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' 3ji 3. /. -/-i- 



HARVARD COLLEGE 
LIBRARY 



GUT op 
JAMES STURGIS PRAY 



To be kept in tlie nuin coUedian of the 
College Libruy 



** '-7<>/'(, 





d^ 




A 



<3t<X-^<4>»> tj 



THE BROWN MARE 



BY ALFRED OLLIVANT 

BOB, SON OF BATTLE 

RED'COAT CAPTAIN 

THE GENTLEMAN 

THE TAMING OF JOHN BLUNT 

THE ROYAL ROAD 

THE BROWN MARE 



THE BROWN MARE 



ALFRED OLLIVANT 




NEW YORK ♦ ALFRED A KNOPF ♦ MCMXVI 



:2^izs, I. 46' 



OOFYRIGHT, 1916, BY 
ALFRED OLLIVANT 




(%n.. ^. 5 C-iAii- 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



\ 



To 
THE BROWN WOMAN 



CONTENTS 

CRAPrn PAGE 

I THE BROWN MARE 9 

II THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 88 

III THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 39 

IV THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 49 
V THE SHADOW 61 

VI THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 76 

VII THE CONSCRIPT 94 

VIII THE MAN IN COMMAND 109 

IX THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 131 

X THE COST 134 



V 



I owe it to the Editors of The At- 
lantic Monthly, Country Ldfe, The 
Boston Transcript, and The Christ- 
church Times of New Zealand, that 
I am allowed to reprint these studies. 



THE BROWN MARE 



HE used to bring her home when he 
came on his winter's leave in the years 
before the War, to hunt with the 
South Down: for she was an unusually fine 
performer across country. And it was there I 
met her. 

A tall upstanding creature, sixteen hands 
and over, very high at the withers, not quite 
clean-bred and yet showing breeding in every 
line. She did not really carry bone enough for 
the heavy Wealden clay, in which your horse 
sinks up to his hocks at every stride; but the 
Major was clearly always pleased when the big 
iron-gray Granite had strained a sinew and he 
could fall back on the mare for an extra day. 
And little stiu-dy Humbleton, the very British 
groom, with the blue eyes, the chestnut hair, 
and stolid way, was just the same. When ex- 



10 THE BROWN MARE 

ercising, he always rode the mare for prefer- 
ence and led the gray. She was honest and she 
was kind, with the heart of a woman and the 
manners of a lady. Yet except for a general 
air of breeding I do not think you would have 
singled her out in a crowd. 

Kitty came first into the Major's stable when 
after a long spell at the War OflSce he went 
back to regimental work and took over the com- 
mand of a Field Battery. I think he picked 
her out of the ranks : maybe the trumpeter had 
been riding her. 

In that stable other horses came and went. 
The mare stayed; and her reputation grew. 

At the big Aldershot meeting the Major en- 
tered her for the Artillery Point-to-point. He 
was never hard on his horses, and didn't ride 
her out. She was not placed. Afterwards he 
heard the whole Brigade had been backing her. 

When the Major got his Jacket and took 
command of the Black Horse Battery at the 
Wood, Humbleton and the mare went with 
him. She was not black: she was brown. 
Therefore he could not ride her on ceremonial 
parades as his first charger. So he bought a 
sporting little black horse with a short back, 



THE BROWN MARE 11 

Dandy by name, on which he rode with nodding 
plume at the head of his Troop down Park 
Lane, across Piccadilly and the Mall, to fire 
salutes on Horse Guards Parade. 

But if she was no longer his first charger she 
was stiU first in his heart ; and for long days on 
Salisbury Pkin durmg autamn n^nceuvres 
she had not her equal. 

There followed three quiet years of prepara- 
tion, the Black Horse Battery doing the Musi- 
cal Drive at Olympia, swirling at the gallop in 
rhjrthmic figures interlaced about the famous 
bronze Gundamuck gun which the Troop had 
lost when covering the retreat from Cabul in 
the first Afghan War and recovered forty 
years later in the second. The Battery drove 
to the admiration of connoisseurs, artists, and 
the London crowd; and then would march 
down to Salisbury Plain to break records 
there in the mimic business of war. 

Then came the reality; and the Major had to 
make the sacrifice of his life, and break up in a 
moment the fighting imit which through three 
laborious years he had trained to the point of 
perfection. Immediately on mobilization he 
was called upon to send all his horses, all his 



12 THE BROWN MARE 

men, and half his officers to complete the 
strength of a first-for-service Battery at Al- 
dershot. He stood with folded arms on the 
barrack-square and watched his famous black 
teams, shining in the sun, and beloved of 
Londoners, file out of the gate. The sub- 
alterns said they thought the Major's heart 
would break. It was perhaps a little comfort 
to him that when horses and men arrived at 
Aldershot the Major of the first-for-service 
Battery there asked his own gun-team drivers 
to give place to the newcomers. 

"These are the drivers of the Black Horse 
Troop,*' he said. 

The only men left the Major were Hiunble- 
ton and his batman; the only horses Dandy 
and the mare. For the rest he had his guns; 
his non-commissioned officers ; a couple of sub- 
alterns, reservists, and the pick of all the horses 
that were streaming into London with which 
to build up a new Battery. 

II 

He had two months in which to do it ; and he 
did it. 



THE BROWN MARE IS 

In those days there was no tarrying. The 
Germans were knocking at the Gates of Calais. 

At the beginning of October the Black 
Horse Battery, its horses no longer black, 
many-coloured, many-cornered, but a hard and 
handy crowd, disembarked at Zeebrugge with 
the Seventh Division in the romantic and des- 
perate endeavour to relieve Antwerp ; and the 
officers of the Guards Brigade to which the 
Battery was attached muttered among them- 
selves that if it was no longer the Battery of 
Olympia days it was still the best Horse Bat- 
tery in England. 

Antwerp fell the day they landed. The 
Immortal Division, 20,000 strong, marched out 
to meet the eiiemy much as David went to meet 
Groliath. In a perilously thin-drawn-out line 
it flung itself across the path of the German 
herds driving bull-headed, himdred thousands 
of them, for the sea and the island that lay 
across the Channel. 

General French sent word to the valiant 
Division that he would reinforce them in five 
hours. Those reinforcements took five days to 
come. But the Division held; though at the 



14 THE BROWN MARE 

end of the stress it had but forty officers left 
out of the four hundred who had disembarked 
at Zeebrugge six weeks before. 

In those tremendous days the Black Horse 
Battery played its fiery part in support of the 
First Battalion of the Grenadier Guards. 
Tried in that white-hot furnace. Guardsmen 
and Gunners proved worthy of each other and 
of the traditions of their great regiments. 
There was no rest by night or day for officers, 
men, or horses. 

Kitty, the mare, took it all very calmly. 
Back with the limbers, on the sheltered side of 
the ridge on which the guns were barking, she 
stretched her long neck, bowed a knee, and 
grazed the Flemish turf at ease much as on 
Salisbury Plain. The hubbub across the ridge, 
her master's fierce peremptory voice, the oc- 
casional biu'st of shrapnel near by, disturbed 
her little. 

Now and then the trumpeter, handing over 
the mare and his own horse to the care of 
Hmnbleton, would crawl to the top of the 
ridge and watch the Battery in action beyond, 
pounding away at the grey-coats struggling in 
the valley. He didn't see much : for the guns 



THE BROWN MARE 16 

were roughly dug in. But once he saw a farm- 
house which the Major was using for ohserva- 
tion post crash down in headlong ruin. 

**Grosh 1" muttered the trumpeter. "Spotted 
'im. He*s done." 

Then the long, lean Major came running 
out of the dust and debris. 

The tnmipeter returned at the trot to his 
horses. 

"Old man ain't 'alf nippy/' he reported to 
Humbleton. 

"He ain't so old neether, then," answered 
Himibleton, who took no liberties with his mas- 
ter himself, and allowed none. 

"Ain't he, then?" retorted the trumpeter 
who must have the last word even in the mouth 
of Hell. "I'll lay he's older than he were 
twenty year ago, then." 

Once on that last desperate day, when the 
one skeleton Cavalry Brigade held in reserve 
was dashing here and there to make good as 
best it might gaps in the broken line, the Major 
got his guns up imder a wall to cover the 
Guards' coimter-attack laimched as a forlorn 
hope. The Germans saw him and swept the 
wall away with a tidal wave of fire. 



"^W— ^^^—^ — — ^— ^— I I iiw I -■»— >— ■— ■— *li^1 



16 THE BROWN MARE 

It was Bear Umber up! and the gun-teams 
came up at the gallop. 

In the hubbub and timiult of shells, shouts, 
of gunners furiously handling guh-wheels, of 
drivers with outstretched whip-hands quieting 
their teams, of bloody men disengaging bloody 
and floundering horses, Kitty, the mare, was 
steady as a rock. 

"Got her, sir?" gasped the trumpeter, as he 
toppled oflF his own horse. 

"Right," said the Major, toe in his stirrup, 
and swung into his saddle. ''Battery column, 
gaUopr 

And somehow or other the Battery swung 
clear. 

Those were astounding days. For three 
weeks the officers and men of that Battery 
never had their clothes oflF, and for days to- 
gether the horses were never unharnessed. 
But whoever else went short Kitty, the mare, 
never suflFered. Humbleton saw to that, and 
to be just the mare saw to herself in her large 
and sensible way, grazing when opportunity 
offered, and snatching bonne bouches from 
ruined haystacks. 

After the first terrible six weeks the Armies 



THE BROWN MARE It 

settled down to trench warfare. It was not 
the game for Horse Artillery; hut the Black 
Horse Battery played it with zest all through 
that first winter. 

The horses stood out in the open and thrived. 
Kitty grew a coat like a bear's ; and the saddle 
sank into her back as into a drift of brown 
snow. But campaigning suited her as it did 
her black companion Dandy. 

Then came promotion. 

The Major, now a Brevet-Lieutenant- 
Colonel, took conmiand of a Field Artillery 
Brigade. That did not last for long. With- 
in a few weeks he and Hmnbleton and the two 
horses were back with the Horse Artillery, the 
Colonel now conmianding a Brigade. 

Ill 

The Headquarters of the Brigade was in a 
chateau some thirty miles behind the firing line. 

When the turn of the Cavalry Division, to 
which the Brigade was attached, came for a 
spell in the trenches, horses and guns made a 
long forced march by night and took up their 
positions early in December of the second win- 
ter of the War. 



18 THE BROWN MARE 

They had three months in the trenches- 
months of sleet and rain, of dogged endurance, 
infinitely dull, varied by lurid nightmare inter- 
ludes. 

When towards the end of February they 
were relieved nobody in the Division regretted 
it. 

That was the time of the heavy snows ; and 
all reliefs were made of necessity at night. 

The Horse Artillery started for the thirty- 
mile trek home at midnight, the long thin line 
of guns, their wheels thick with snow, trailing 
worm-like through the white dimness that 
muffled the noise of their going and made the 
procession strangely ghost-like. 

Wagons and kits were to follow later. 

The Colonel gave his Brigade an hour's 
start* 

It was just one when his batman came to the 
door of his much-shelled lodging and an- 
nounced that Humbleton and the horses were 
outside. 

The Colonel, busy destroying papers, went 
to the door, accompanied by his terrier Bruiser. 
The little groom, in his goat-skin coat, stood 
outside in the snow, the horses in hand. Dandy 



THE BROWN MARE 19 

stretched a neck to greet his little friend, the 
terrier, standing three-legged, and shivering in 
the snow, while the mare nibbled tentatively at 
a pile of wood close by. 

"Don't let her eat that!" ordered the Colonel 
ferociously. 

He always spoke to his servants as if they 
were his mortal enemies and he wished them to 
know he knew it. And they took more from 
him than they would have done from many a 
man with a smoother tongue and a smaller 
heart. It was just the old man's way, they 
said among themselves. And he had the quali* 
ties which ensured respect if they did not win 
love. He was just, consistent, and in the 
heart of him considerate. So, to the surprise 
of many, they always stuck to him. 

The Colonel went back to his room with 
Bruiser, and piled on layer upon layer of 
clothes: sweaters, hunting-waistcoats, Norfolk 
jackets, towards the top a suit of oilskins, and 
over aU a Burberry. 

In multitudinous pockets he stuffed an elec- 
tric torch, a flask, a thermos, a map, a ball of 
string, an extra pair of gloves, a muflier, and 
other odds and ends. The lean Colonel, now 



20 THE BROWN MARE 

a very portly man, gave certain curt instruc- 
tions to his batman, tied Bruiser, who was to 
follow with the kits, to the leg of the table, 
and mounted Dandy: for he knew of old that 
the mare was not clever in the snow. 

Then he set off into the night, Humbleton 
and the mare following in his wake. 

Once clear of the village the Colonel looked 
roimd. In that little distance he had already 
gained greatly on the other pair. 

He waved for the groom to come up along- 
side. 

"Leg her up," he ordered gruffly. "Keep 
her alongside me." 

Side by side master and man rode along 
through the night, the snow coating them 
heavily. 

"She's walking abominably," said the 
Colonel. 

"Yes, sir," answered Hiunbleton, who never 
wasted words, least of all on his master. 

Laboriously the Colonel disengaged his 
electric torch and flashed it on the mare. 

What he saw he didn't like. 

The snow was heavy on her shoulders, thick 
in her ears, plastering her heavy coat ; and she 



THE BROWN MARE «1 

was slouching along disconsolately, her head 
down, as though smelling out a track. 

It's that wood's poisoned her, thought the 
Colonel; hut he didn't say anything. 

''Does she feel all right?" he asked. 

**Yes, sir,** answered Humhleton. 

Twelve miles out they stopped at a little 
estaminet for a water and feed. 

Dandy tucked into his nose-bag greedily. 
The mare would not look at hers. 

''Come on, missus," said Humhleton. 

He warmed some water, making a weak 
gruel, sprinkled bran on the top, and held the 
bucket to her nostrils temptingly. 

She breathed on it, her breath mingling with 
the steam, but would not touch it. 

The Colonel walked round her with anxious 
eyes, pulled her ears, hand-rubbed her cold 
pasterns. 

Ifs that wood, he thought. 

Then he rummaged in his multitudinous 
pockets. After long search he produced a 
thermometer and took her temperature. 

It was 108; and there was still a twenty-mile 
march before them. 

He got her a baU and gave it her. 



22 THE BROWN MARE 

There was no stabling at the estaminet; and 
nothing for it therefore but to go on. 

He swung into his saddle again. 

The track lay before them invisible save for 
the half -obliterated furroughs left by the gun- 
wheels. The snow came waving across them in 
white curtains that almost seemed to lighten 
the darkness. The moustaches of both men 
froze and were thatched with snow. The two 
white-cloaked figures laboured along side by 
side like two phantom horsemen with feet of 
lead. 

The mare seemed to come on a little better. 

Every now and then the Colonel said — 

"How's she feel now?" 

And Himibleton answered — 

"Very queer, sir." 

At length they came to the foot of a long 
bare ridge, stretching interminably before 
them, smooth and bleak and white as a shroud, 
great ciui;ains of snow flapping dismally across 
its desolate face. 

The mare stopped. 

Both men dismounted. The Colonel with 
a hoof -picker, disengaged with difficulty from 



THE BROWN MARE «8 

a remote interior pocket, emptied her hoofs of 
the balling snow. 

He thought she was going to lie down ; and 
once she lay down on that slope he knew he 
would never get her up again. 

He and Humbleton, crouching in the snow, 
hand-rubbed her legs and flanks. Then they 
started leading her up the slope. 

The two men were wonderfully kind and 
patient with the suffering creature; far more 
kind and patient with her than with each other. 

The forlorn little group toiled desolately up 
the slope, now engulfed in a billow of waving 
white, now emerging into blotted dimness, the 
wind rollicking away with terrible laughter in 
the valley below. The horses, with windy 
tails tucked-in and strewn about their flanks, 
plodded on with downward heads, shaking the 
snow from their ears like big dogs with a rat- 
tle of accoutrements that soimded weirdly in 
the night. 

Honest and kind as always, the mare was 
doing her dumb best; and both men knew it. 
One on either side, they shouldered her up the 
slope, easing her, halting her, talking to her. 



24 THE BROWN MARE 

coaxing her on a step at a time, as a nurse 
teaching a child to walk. And every now and 
then she ruhbed her snowy head against one 
man or the other, as though recognizing their 
love, and wishing to tell them about it. 

Somehow or other they bolstered her up to 
the top of that Ridge of Windy Death. 

Down in the valley, on the other side, the 
Colonel hoped he might find a Cavalry Divi- 
sion, and some shelter for the mare. 

He was right. 

As they descended the slope, the mare walk- 
ing more easily, they found themselves among 
friends. 

The Gunners were in possession of the val- 
ley. 

Officers and men with lanterns came to the 
rescue. Most of them knew the Colonel; 
many of them the mare. A veterinary sur- 
geon was found and pulled out of his bed. 
The mare was given a roomy box in a farm. 
She revived somewhat. Willing hands bedded 
her down in bracken. Hmnbleton set to work 
to warm and dry her. The Colonel took her 
temperature and found it less. 

The light was just stealing over the white- 



THE BROWN MARE JM 

bosomed hills and snow-thatched roofs when 
he swung into the saddle to ride the last long 
stage to his Headquarters alone. 

The mare was playing with some hay, and 
Humbleton was rugging her up, as he left 
her. 

IV 

All that day he was busy, and no news came 
through; but a horse of his Orderly Officer 
died partly from exposure and partly from 
eating wood, the vet. said. 

Next morning early the Colonel rode oflF to 
the valley where the mare was to see how 
things were going. 

As he rode up to the yard of the farm, Hum- 
bleton, looking in his goat-skin like a little 
clean-shaven Robinson Crusoe, came ploughing 
through the snow to meet him. 

He looked very dogged and did not catch 
the ColoneFs eye. 

"Well?" said the Colonel. 

"Mare's dead, sir," answered the little man. 

"Indeed!" said the Colonel rudely. "What 
time?" 

"Two o'clock this morning." 



26 THE BROWN MARE 

The Colonel said nothing and dismounted. 

Heavily he walked through the slush of the 
farmyard towards the loose-box and en- 
tered. 

Honest and kind in death as in life, the 
brown mare lay on her side, rough of coat, her 
long flat neck stretched out, her long thin legs 
slightly crooked, her shoes upturned and shin- 
ing, looking strangely pathetic. 

Over her head Humbleton had scrawled in 
chalk upon a beam : 

KITTY: 

Died for her country, 

1 March, 1916. 

The Colonel stood above her. 

He was glad she had such a thick bed of 
bracken to rest upon. 

Then he bent and felt her heart. 

One of those strange and overwhelming 
waves of emotion, of which we cannot trace the 
origin, came surging up out of the inland ocean 
of his being and choked him. 

He kicked the bracken about with his feet, 
and blew his nose. 

Then he said — 

"We shall miss her, Humbleton.*' 



THE BROWN MARE VI 

The little groom, standing in his goat-skin 
jacket in the door, his back towards his master, 
looked out over the snow and answered noth- 
ing. 



THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 

MISTY9 toiling, mute, she was much 
as we had left her, in outward 
seeming at all events, as we made 
our way up the Mersey between crowded banks 
on that chill October morning. But for the 
fact that a sentry with a rifle and fixed bay- 
onet paced the wharf, you would never have 
known that England was engaged in a life- 
and-death struggle such as she has not known 
for a hundred years. 

And the same held good as we travelled 
south. There were a few more men in khaki 
about the stations, a few more tents beside the 
line, a few strange placards on the hoardings : 
for the rest, battered men ploughed behind 
steaming horses under dank and dripping 
woodlands as of old; coveys of partridges 
whirred away over purpling hedges ; and warm 
old farms, warmer and older surely than any 
others in the world, seemed to sleep as they had 
slept for centuries. 

28 



THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 29 

At Stafford we Jeft the train to spend the 
night with a friend in a village hard by; and 
here we came on the first signs of the Inva- 
sion. 

Our friend had an empty cottage in her gar- 
den, and was preparing it for the invaders. 
That morning had brought her a telephone 
message from the organizing Secretary of the 
Central Committee at Birmingham, saying — 

"Several crowds of refugees arrived. Am 
sending you some." 

The message was vague and of a character 
to have crushed the spirit of one less valiant 
than our friend. Nothing daunted, she had 
sallied down at once into the village, and asked 
for what she needed. One had given a mat- 
tress, another a chair, a third had offered two 
eggs a day for a month. One man would meet 
the refugees at the station with a truck, an- 
other would supply vegetables from his allot- 
ment: all were helping in their humble way. 
That day the promised refugees did not arrive. 
Next morning our friend went into Birming- 
ham and made her way to the Central Receiv- 
ing Hall. There were refugees in their hun- 
dreds, waiting for hosts to claim them. She 



ti 



80 THE BROWN MARE 

wandered up and down amongst them much as 
of old a Roman matron may have wandered up 
and down the slave-market of her imperial city. 
A nursing mother with a swarm of little chil- 
dren ran after her, begging to be taken. 

**IVe nothing but a poor little cottage to of- 
fer you," our friend had said. 

O, madame !" the poor woman had replied. 
Anywhere where I can be alone with my chil- 
dren and see to them properly. We have lived 
in herds for weeks." 

That was her cry ; and it is the cry of millions 
more in Western Europe to-day. 

Indeed, the first thing you hear on your re- 
turn to England is that cry raised on every 
side; the first thing you see is this stream of 
helpless, homeless exiles driven forth from their 
farms and cottages and peaceful towns before 
this tornado of death and destruction that has 
swept their innocent land. 

When I reached London and went down to 
that poor quarter of the town where of old I 
lived and worked I found the same story. 

"How are things going?" I asked the stew- 
ardess, as I entered the bar-parlour of our 
Club for Working-men. 



THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 81 

**Very slack, sir," she answered. **WeVe 
over forty of our members at the War. It's 
all Belgian Refugees now." 

As I walked down the aUey I saw that the 
house we had been fitting up in July last as a 
Girls' Club had been rechristened Maison 
Beige. Strange, dark peasant women leaned 
out of the windows ; strange children of strange 
speech played in the garden. 

At twelve hours' notice that little house had 
been fitted up to receive refugees toward the 
end of August. The call came late one ni^t. 
The neighbours rushed to the rescue. Mat- 
tresses, pots and pans, tables and chairs, came 
pouring in from the houses of rich and poor. 
And after them came the vanquished of Liege : 
women and girls, old men, boys, and children. 
They had lost everything but each other. One 
woman had seen two of her children scattered 
to death by a shell before her eyes ; another sat 
down and wept for endless hours when first 
she found the shelter of those blank but kindly 
walls. 

"I thought she'd nevet have done, poor 
lamb," said a sympathetic neighbour. 

Others did not know where their husbands, 



32 THE BROWN MARE 

f athers, brothers, srons might be. All had their 
story: most had little more. 

Since Maison Beige was established thou- 
sands from all over London have trooped to 
see the children with their hands and feet cut 
off, their eyes gouged out, by the Prussian sol- 
diers—and have been sent away disappointed. 
As though anything imaginable of man could 
exceed the horror of the thing consummated! 
— a country razed; swept as by fire of houses, 
human beings, stock; the patient toil of genera- 
tions thrown on the rubbish-heap of Time ; men 
maimed, women dying uncared for in child- 
birth, girls shooting themselves, children lost 
and starving to death in woods and desolate 
rat-haunted bams — ^and all innocent, as even 
their persecutors admit, of any crime. 

"Ce sont des braves gens, les Allemands!" 
said a noble girl I found busy at her lace-work 
in an upper room at the Club; and she said it 
with an irony so gentle that at first I did not 
detect the terrible quality of it. 

She herself and a crowd of others had been 
locked into a church for two days — ^^'sans 
nourriture." 

Then they had burst out and made for the 



THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 88 

ships and the sea — ^men and women and chil- 
dren, a trembling mass of fugitives driven be- 
fore this tidal wave of cruelty and brutality and 
death; many of them spending days in open 
boats on the terrible waters that were still 
kinder than Prussian steel. 

It was such an expulsion as not even the 
Edict of Nantes had caused. 

And that is how England has come to be 
invaded. And her invaders are everywhere. 
Belgian girls are selling Belgian papers on the 
curb within a stone's-throw of Charing Cross. 
Not a street in London but out of one or more 
houses hang the black and red and yellow of 
the Belgian flag. In the streets, at the sta- 
tions, emerging from the houses of the rich, 
and issuing from the mews and alleys where 
dwell the poor, are strange-faced men, with 
strange-cut beards, in strange hats, who talk a 
strange tongue, and solid simple peasant 
women, unlike our own, their neat black shawls 
about their heads. 

And the stories of these invaders as you hear 
them on buss or car are pitiful enough. 

A Saturday or two ago I was at Waterloo 



84 THE BROWN MARE 

Station. Two men stood outside the door of 
a carriage I was about to enter. One of them, 
an obvious Englishman, asked me if I was 
going down to Weybridge. I answered yes. 
He asked me if I would see his friend^ a Bel- 
gian, out at the station. 

**He speaks no English/' he said. "He was 
a customer of ours in Brussels." 

The Belgian and I entered. He was a com- 
fortable bourgeois, sleek, clean-shaven, im- 
maculately dressed, admirably fed. Every 
great city of the Western world possesses 
thousands of such citizens, self-respecting^ 
prosperous, middle-aged, who go down to their 
offices in the city every morning and return to 
their viUa in the suburbs every evening. 

He, it seemed, was a wholesale druggist. 
For thirty years he had been trading in Brus- 
sels and had done well ; growing gradually and 
without offence in his own eyes and those of 
his neighbours. His bank account had ex- 
panded year by year, and so had his waistcoat. 
Industrious, innocuous; loving his friends and 
clients well, not hating his competitors unduly; 
what he lacked in vision made up for by be- 
nevolence; as good as most of us, and better 



THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 85 

perhaps than some ; he had passed quietly into 
afl9uent middle-age. He was not married — 
perhaps he had been too selfish: he lived with 
his two sisters and a brother instead — ^perhaps 
because it was his duty. He had bought house- 
property — seven houses in all; and laid by 
money. He loved his little comforts, and his 
habits were dear to him. Every Sunday he 
took his stroll about the town and eyed with 
comfortable assurance the houses that meant 
for him ease and weU-being in his old age. 

On the 80th of July last there had been few 
happier men on earth than my well-lined 
friend. A week later this plump man, who 
had never known hardship, to whom his coffee 
after dinner was so dear, and his hot-water- 
bottle in bed of winter evenings ahnost a neces- 
sity, was a wanderer on the face of the earth. 

"C'est dur. Monsieur. C'est dur," he said, 
and the tears coursed down his cheeks. 

I was at my wit*s end to know how to com- 
fort him. 

True he was mainly concerned about him- 
self ; but if his view was not exalted it was 
touchingly human. 



86 THE BROWN MARE 

He asked me how long I thought the War 
would last. Somehow he had managed to get 
hold of 1,200 francs before he fled, he and his 
sisters and his brother. 

If the war lasted no more than six months 
his little store would see him and his through — 
at 7 francs a day the four. 

"Ce n'est pas beaucoup, Monsieur, pour 
quatre I" 

If it lasted more, one year, two years — 
Ahl— 

He shrugged his stout shoulders. 

"I do not tell my sisters," he said. "Such 
things are not for women." 

"YouVe got us behind you," I ventured 
lamely. "England — ^the world." 

"Ah, yes. Monsieur," he admitted. "But to 
be dependent — ^to live on charity I Ah, c'est 
terrible — terrible.'^ And he was crying once 
again. 

In the days of his prosperity, it seemed, he 
had bought his drugs, some in England, some 
in Grermany. 

Did I think he would ever buy of Grermany 
again? He clicked his thimib-nail against 



THE INVASION OF ENGLAND 87 

his front-teeth, making a vicious snapping 
noise. 

''Jamais I Jamais I Jamais !" 

That fat man who had never hated in his life 
hated now. 

And it is not only by women and children, 
the old and the invalid, that England has been 
invaded to-day. 

Everywhere in the grey bustle of the streets, 
amid the flaming glory of autumn woods, in 
great thoroughfares and country lanes, you are 
surprised by men— in their prime, singly or in 
groups, wearing a blue uniform strange to our 
eyes ; some of them limping, some with arms in 
slings, some with bandaged heads; and not a 
few, especially among the younger men, with 
faces so purged by suffering that the dross of 
human nature has been swept away leaving 
the pure gold of the spirit. They creep on 
crutches in and out of extemporized hospitals ; 
they sun themselves on the seats of country 
houses turned into convalescent homes. And 
wherever we meet one such, be he a humble 
private of the line hobbling along, or a staff 
officer dashing by in an automobile lent him 



88 THE BROWN MARE 

by a wealthy host, our instinct is to raise our 
hats to the representative of the land that has 
flung itself in desperate valour across the path 
of the hordes whose goal was the city from 
which I write. 



THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 

SUDDENLY in the grey December 
afternoon, as we slid along the street, 
those astonishing newspaper placards 
shot out at us : 

EAST COAST TOWNS BOMBARDED. 

Leaning forward in the taxi, I pointed them 
out to the Woman. 

"What about Frog?" j^as her immediate in- 
quiry. 

Frog was her nephew; and Frog was at 
school on the East Coast — at Scarborough. 

"It's probably Yarmouth again/' I said; 
and my words were not entirely disinterested. 

At the beginning of the War I had made a 
solemn resolution to buy one paper in the 
morning and one at night — ^and no more ; and 
so far, in spite of manifold temptations, I had 
kept to my resolve. The evening paper is 
bought after dinner at 8.15 precisely. At 

89 



40 THE BROWN MARE 

8.18 I rise from my dinner, fumble in the box 
in the lobby for the latch-key, sally out, wet or 
fine^ cross the greasy road, and at the little 
shop in the side-street where they sell sweets 
and papers spend a penny. 

And it was now 8.80. 

"Don't you think you could get an evening 
paper early this once?" suggested my wife, 
who was an Aunt as well. 

**I hate departing from my principles," I 
said with marked acridity, and gripped the 
copper in my pocket with tenacious fist. 

A habit once established is dear to me as 
life. 

But the man on the lift could afford a news- 
paper, it seemed, if I could not. 

"Any news?" I asked innocently, as we as- 
cended to our flat. 

"Yes, sir," he answered. "Scarborough in 
ruins I— Something shocking." 

It was too much for me. The thou^t of 
that sturdy blue-eyed urchin of ten, with his 
plume of fair hair, and his wonderful air of 
integrity^ whom I had last seen on the lawn 
courted by the bridesmaids in that remote vil- 
lage of Bucks on the glorious August morning 



THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 41 

I took the Woman to be my wife, overwhelmed 
me. 

Self-respect forbade me to offer to buy the 
porter's halfpenny paper second-hand. So I 
threw my principles and my penny alike to the 
winds, and descending in the lift spent far 
more than I could afford on the nearest paper. 

There was little in it but that cool, curt an- 
nouncement from the Admiralty: 

Between 8 and 9 thU morning Scarborough, Whithy, 
and the HartlepooU were bombarded by an enemy 
squadron. 

The situation is developing, 

I was not unduly concerned for Scar- 
borough, Whitby, or the Hartlepools. The 
bombardment was an incident in the War — a 
pin-prick ; not unexpected ; the somewhat spite- 
ful retort to the destruction of the German 
Pacific Squadron. One met the incident much 
as one would meet the jeers of a street-boy. 
In my heart I was not even greatly concerned 
about Frog. Scarborough might be in ruins, 
as the porter averred ; but I had a clear vision 
of Master Frog sauntering about amid those 
ruins on those pillar-like little legs of his, full 
of aplomb, both hands deep in his pockets, a 



42 THE BROWN MARE 

very big bull's-eye plugging his cheek, as he 
blunted the toes of his boots against the broken 
concrete. 

But I was the husband of the Aunt of Frog; 
and Frog's mother and my wife were singular 
and intimate allies ; and Frog's mother was in 
London. 

We speculated with interest on the action 
she would take. 

**I bet old Edie got the funks and wired 
for him to come home," said the Woman, who 
was not above criticism of her friend. 

"She'd hardly be such an ass, surely," I re- 
marked. "What would be the good when it 
was all over? Besides, it was in the middle of 
term." 

''There's * only one Frog," said his Aunt 
sagaciously. "And term's nearly over." 

"If she did take him away. Frog will never 
forgive her," I muttered. 

I knew Frog. 

He was a typical little Anglo-Saxon — 
sturdy, dogged, unimaginative; combining al- 
ready in his small person that passion for re- 
ligion and sport whkh is stiU the charaxAeristic 
of the men of his country and his class. It was 



THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 48 

known that he was akeady in his football 
eleven; and it was whispered in the family that 
he had started an Anti-swearing League at 
school. 

"I expect Edie'U come round this evening/' 
said the Woman. 

But she did not. 

And the next morning brought nothing but , 
a postcard from another Aunt. 

Where is Frog? 

It was not till the evening that the question 
was answered. 

Then the door opened quietly, and a small 
and merry boy grinned in it, his stately mother 
towering behind. 

"Who's the coward?" came yells from the 
sofa and the arm-chair at once. 

"Not me r* piped Frog, already in his Aunt's 
arms. 

**It's mother I" came the mocking voice from 
the sofa. "I know her. Ediel" 

"No ; it's not 1" The rich voice of the mother 
blended with the shrill treble of the boy. "It's 
Booth." 

Booth was Frog's schoolmaster. 

"Of course they put it on the absent one!" 



44 THE BROWN MARE 

jeered the mocker. "Now, Frog I let's hear all 
about it." 

The boy sat solidly down, his merry face rip- 
pling smiles. His legs were so short that his 
feet were off the floor, and he swung them, as 
he gave us his first experience of war. 

"Well, we were at breakfast when it began 1" 
he chirped. 

"Did you know what it was?" 

"Rather 1 We knew at once. Only Mr. 
Bagshaw tried to make out it was the Fleet 
practising. But of course we knew it wasn't." 

He laughed gaily at the ineffectual wile of 
the young master. 

"How did you know?" 

"Because of the noise." 

"What was it like?" 

He did not answer at once, and became sud- 
denly grave. This was the thing that had most 
impressed his impressionable boyish mind. 
All else might pass. That would remain — ^the 
noise ! the noise ! 

"Why, it was like nothing else you ever 
heard. It was awful — ^and the smell!" 

There was a moment's pause. Then the 
cross-examination continued. 



THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 45 

"Was the school struck by shells?" 

"No ; but the house next door was — ^a lot of 
times." 

We seemed to see it all; the bare gas-lit haU 
of the school; the boys sitting round the long 
tables in the dim December morning, opening 
their mothers* letters ; the matron, rather cross, 
serving out the porridge; the maids, rather 
sleepy, handing it round ; the young master in 
his pince-nez feeling his unshaven chin, and 
wishing he*d had time to shave — and suddenly 
all about them legions of screaming devils 
swooping out of the sea; tornadoes of terrify- 
ing noise ; a stench as of a pestilence ; the abom- 
ination of desolation abroad on every hand. 

Noise and stench 1 — stench and noise! — and 
again noise and stench! 

"What happened?" 

"We took our bread-and-butter and went 
down into the cellar and finished our break- 
fast there," chirped the embryo Englishman. 

"Was anybody afraid ?" 

"Shaw and Jackson were a bit funky. 
Shaw's the son of an Admiral." Frog seemed 
to think that in some mysterious way the oc- 
cupation of the father explained and justified 



46 THE BROWN MARE 

the conduct of the son. "His mother always 
said he would be," he added, by way of con- 
firmation. 

They gathered in the dimness of the cellar, 
listening to the shrieking horror outside. 
Some munched their bread-and-butter, and 
pretended they did not mind. Some teased 
the frightened maids; some comforted them. 
The young master, a trifle flustered, but de- 
termined to do his duty and keep his charges 
calm, continued to babble about the Fleet. 
The bolder spirits climbed to the grating and 
peeped out — ^to be driven back by that abom- 
inable stench. And Shaw and Jackson whim- 
pered a little in the comer, to a chorus of brutal 
"O, shut ups !" from unfeeling comrades. 

Houses were crashing down on every side 
of them. 

"What happened next?" 

"Why, Mr. Booth said, *I think we'll go 
for a walk on the golf-links.' So we all went 
out to the golf-links, where there are two hills. 
And we stood between them for about an hour. 
And then we went back. And that was all." 

It was all ; but it was enough for the present 
— ^so, apparently, thought Mr. Booth. 



THE BOMBARDMENT; AND A BOY 47 

He packed all the boys home by the next 
train, sending their trunks after them. 

Most of them carried with them a memory 
of a noise and stench that will never leave them ; 
and some a more material trophy of the bom- 
bardment. 

*'Frog had a bit of shell/' said his mother. 

"I haven't got it now," chimed in Frog. 

"What happened to itf' asked the Woman 
in her swift way. 

"I swopped it for five bob V* 

Trogl" cried his indignant Aunt. 

'Well, you see, I had another bit," said Frog 
apologetically. 

"And what happened to that?" 

"I lost it in the train." 

It was so human and above all so school- 
boyish that we forgave him with laughter that 
somehow did not seem out of place. 

But he ended his narrative with a little un- 
conscious touch that brought us back to the 
realities. 

"One fellow got a letter that was covered 
with blood." 

And we remembered that a postman on his 
rounds, standing talking at the door to a maid 






48 THE BROWN MARE 

to whom he was delivering the letters, had had 
his head blown off; and the bag, packed with 
messages of peace, and goodwill from all over 
the earth, had been soaked with the blood of an 
innocent man, shed deliberately to testify that 
Hate still ruled the world. 

A strange Christmas I 

A strange Christmas story, with its gleams 
of laughter and underlying sense of trag^yl 

Frog's grandchildren will love him to tell it 
them« And to tease the old man, they will 
press to know what happened to the bit of shell. 

Then grandfather will confess with shame, 
bowing his white head. And the children will 
aU stand round him in their smocks, with bare 
legs and very round eyes, and chirrup with one 
accord — 

*'0 grandfather!" 



THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 

IT is said that we Anglo-Saxons take our 
pleasures sadly; and there is truth in the 
saying. It might be added with equal 
truth that we take our sorrows with a peculiar 
kind of flippancy that only those who under- 
stand us can perhaps appreciate. 

England has never been so spiritual as dur- 
ing the last two or three decades. In all her 
lengthy history she has never been so earnest 
or so united as she is about the business she 
has to-day in hand. 

Yet it is to a music-hall song that her young 
men have been pouring in their thousands to 
strew the Marches of Flanders with their will- 
ing bodies; hurrying from the quadrangles of 
ancient public-schools, and the courts of still 
more ancient Universities; trooping from of- 
fice, from factory, from counter, and from 
mill to trenches filled with icy water, to pris- 
ons, privations, wounds unspeakable, and 
death. 

49 



60 THE BROWN MARE 

It*9 a long way to Tipperary, 
It's a long, long way to go. 
It's a long way to Tipperary, 
To the sweetest girl I know, 

is being sung by men not light in spirit nor 
poor in intellectual equipment, but men who 
know what they are fighting for as truly as did 
those troopers of Cromwell who in the dawn 
before Dunbar chaunted tremendously — 

The Lord of Hosts my Shepherd is. 

Fifty years ago men of the same stock were 
flocking to another standard, to uphold the 
same ideal, singing in much the same spirit— 

We are coming. Father Abraham, 
We are coming, millions strong. 

Our men sing then- battle-song as yours sang 
theirs — ^with an apparent carelessness that 
serves as a mask to disguise the real spiritual 
fervour behind. 

We who stay at home and wait do not sing it. 
Indeed, we do not sing at all. The horror is 
always with us; and the ache that knows no 
end. We who wait feel it as those who fight 
do not — ^let us be thankful for it. It is our 



THE MIND OP AN EMPIRE 61 

smaU share of the universal burthen, never for 
a moment to be laid aside. 

At night that great ghastly white arm which 
sweeps over London, taps at your window, 
feeling the darkness, searching the uttermost 
parts of the heavens with probing fingers to 
find, if it may, its enemy amid the stars, to 
grapple with him there, and bring him hurling 
down to earth, will not allow us to forget. 
And all day, as you go down the street, WAR, 
with all its terrible associations deep-seated in 
the memory of the race, is shouted at you from 
a hundred sides : the recruiting posters on the 
wall; the endless tramp of the brown battal- 
ions ; the horses picketed in the Parks ; the voice 
of the driU-sergeant ringing in squares and 
courtyards long after the few rare lamps which 
sentinel our streets have been lit; the TtLgsed 
urchins in paper cocked hats marching in Ihe 
gutter han^g on empty biscuit tins; and, by 
no means least, those long, grey deadly ar- 
moured cars stealing through the misty streets, 
like squadrons of destroyers, whence no man 
knows, whither none can say, the lean guns 
snarling through the shields, one look-out man 
aloft, and in the shield under the gun a long 



e« THE BROWN MARE 

slit, through which you see a row of eyes ; while 
behind the cars in ordered clouds, scurrying 
along bent over their motor-bicycles, come the 
remainder of the guns' crews. Devilish in 
their possibilities; beautiful in their speed and 
power with a terrible beauty that makes you 
shudder while you must admire. 

Certainly Florence itself at the height of the 
Renaissance was not fuller of significance 
than is London to-day. The red-cross flags 
flap overhead; the Roll of Honoiu* daily 
lengthens in your Club ; the young widows with 
the shining eyes, peering out of their black 
habiliments, startle you as they spring on you 
out of the fog; and a soldier with a limp hob- 
bles down the street before you, carrying by its 
knob the black Pichelhavbe of the Prussian he 
slew at the parapet of his trench. 

The Hun is at the gate ! 

And never for one moment may man, 
woman, or child forget it. 

Things great and small remind us con- 
tinually of his presence in our midst. 

Tom cannot come to lunch because he is 
manning the anti-aircraft gun on the top of a 



THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 68 

Government building from 8 a. m. to 2 p. m. 
every day. 

And very funny Tom looks, his sister re- 
ports, with a delicious little giggle, in his coarse 
blue uniform that makes people at the station 
mistake him for a porter — Tom of all men; 
Tom of the Bachelors' Club who till July was 
certainly one of the three best-dressed men in 
London. 

Margaret has not been seen for months be- 
cause she has been serving as a probationer in 
the great house in her village which has been 
turned, at the owner's wish, into a hospital; 
and the ball-room is now a ward — ^the ball- 
room in which last July she danced with young 
Forbes of the Scots Guards, who sleeps his last 
sleep on a steep hillside Ypres-way, with his 
face to Berlin and his back to Calais. 

And unroarious old Pongo's sword has come 
home quietly — ^with a label attached. The 
General, we are told, is riding Dorothy, the 
rat-tailed bay; while Lamplighter, the chest- 
nut, got cut to pieces over a barbed-wire en- 
tanglement. Anyway, dear Pongo will not 
need the horses he loved any more. 

Harry, too, has disappeared from society. 



64 THE BROWN MARE 

not because he has committed a crime, but be- 
cause he is a Special Constable on duty every 
other day from 2 a. m. to 6 a. m., and therefore 
has to sleep during the day. While Bob, the 
man of peace, who in spite of his forty-five 
years preserves the innocent blue eye and 
merry, bird-like air of the boy of ten. Bob, 
who spends all his days lecturing on Bank- 
ruptcy in London University, passes laborious 
evening hours, that of old he hoarded jealously 
for his wife and little daughters, in a company 
of others like unto himself, in a dingy court- 
yard, forming platoon, turning right, advan- 
cing column, and being asked by a Sergeant- 
Ma j or in a voice of thunder what the 'ell he 
thinks he's playing at. 

It is such a Christmas as none of us have 
known, and such as our children will never 
know. And that is the thought which com- 
forts, which strengthens, which abides. 

It is all worth while — ^the sufferings, the sus- 
pense, the bereavements — if the shadow of the 
horror that has hung over the earth so long 
can be lifted for ever from the hearts of men. 

With malice towardt none; with charity for all; 
with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the 



THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 65 

right — lei us strive on to finish the work toe are in; to 
bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shM 
have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphan; 
to do all which may achieve and cherish a lasting 
peace. 

The spirit voiced by Abraham Lincoln is the 
spirit of England to-day. 

We are striving on to finish the work we 
are in. The 

Stem Daughter of the Voice of God 

is calling us at least as insistently as she called 
our fathers in Wordsworth's time. 

And we are hearkening to her call — ^let us 
say it in all thankfulness and humility. 

A month back I attended a wedding. In 
ordinary times it would have been fashionable. 
Now it was quiet. The father of the bride had 
snatched a few hours' leave from commanding 
his regiment on the East Coast^o attend; and 
the best man, also in khaki, was enabled to be 
present because he had been shot through the 
mouth during the retreat from Mons. 

**IVe got my new teeth in to-day,*' he said. 
"I feel as if I'd a portmanteau in my 
mouth." 

Next day he was to join the Special Reserve 



56 THE BROWN MARE 

Battalion, and expected to return to the front 
in a month. 

On New Year's Day he went — ^not joyfully, 
but because he had to. 

"It's a beastly business," he said. "But 
we've got to see it through." 

And that is the attitude of all these humble 
men of war who have the work in hand. 

Indeed, there is no swagger about our sol- 
diers of to-day: Ancient Pistol died long ago. 
There is no rhodomontade about glory; no af- 
fectation of recklessness. Sincerity is the key- 
note of the hom* and the nation — ^the sincerity 
that comes from a spiritual awakening, itself 
the result of contact with reality. And it has 
affected us throughout: women as well as men, 
girls and boys alike. 

"Everybody's natural now," said a girl the 
other day. "We've all dropped oiu* frills. 
It's such a comfort." 

Since the overthrow of the Prussian Guard 
on the banks of the Yser somewhere about mid- 
November last year * every British oflScer and 

• Written in 1915. 



THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 67 

man who could be spared has been sent home 
on seventy-two hours' leave. 

And they have made a deep impression on 
us all, these returning veterans. They were 
so quiet and so determined; never doubting 
the result; somewhat astonished at the frame 
of mind of those at home. 
/ **Why are you all so depressed here?" said 
a staff-oflScer recently returned. 

We are not in fact depressed; but we have 
not been living on the spiritual heights of those 
men who have been fighting up to their throats 
in mud in Flanders, the odds 8 to 1 against 
them for most of a month, as the record of the 
7th Division shows — ^the 7th Division which, 
landing early in October, had 40 officers left 
out of the original 400 six weeks later. 

In the British Service officers and men have 
always been very close : "We were a band of 
brothers," wrote Nelson of his comrades of the 
Nile ; but surely they have never been so close 
sA in this last great testiQg time. And I am 
not sure which is the more delightful — ^to hear 
the officers gossip about the men, or the men 
chat of their officers. 



68 THE BROWN MARE 

A corporal, lying wounded in a London hos- 
pital, yesterday told a friend a little tale il- 
lustrative of the point. He was on outpost 
duty, and was short of a man for sentry. 

A staff-officer, passing, asked him what was 
the matter. 

^'IVe four posts, sir ; and only three men in 
my relief,*' the corporal explained. 

"I'll take a turn,*' said the officer. 

He shouldered a rifle and paced his beat for 
two hours. 

''Thdr officers wouldn't have done that, I'D 
lay I" ended the corporal. His criticism of 
their officers may have been unjust, but served 
at least as a delightful tribute to his own. 

Officers and men alike have returned to the 
Front now. 

No one of them would have stayed this side 
the water if he could ; no one of them returned 
to the trenches with joy — or pretended to. 

It was necessity that drove: the need to rid 
the earth of a terror, to exterminate a false 
ideal that has throttled men and enslaved them 
for a thousand centuries, to bring an errant na- 
tion back to the paths of peace — ^lest govern- 



THE MIND OF AN EMPIRE 69 

ment of the people by the people for the peo- 
ple perish from the earth. For that ideal 
Americans gave their best yesterday and the 
day before ; and Englishmen are giving theirs 
to-day. 

''I felt like a schoolboy going back to the 
cane," wrote a friend, who has seen war in many 
lands, as he turned his back on London and set 
his face towards the sea again. 

And you find the same thought expressed 
everywhere. 

The modem man does not care for War for 
its own sake — once he has experienced it. 

At Christmas we were staying in a country- 
house. 

The old Colonel, whose fighting days are 
done, lay upstairs in a bed from which he will 
never rise, looking somewhat pathetic in a new- 
grown beard. His son, commanding now the 
Horse Artillery battery his father commanded 
twenty-five years ago, is in the trenches, his 
guns right up alongside the infantry, firing at 
800 yards from what he elegantly describes as 
funk-pits. The old gardener, who was the 
Colonel's soldier-servant and followed him 



60 THE BROWN MARE 

over land and sea for thirty years, was some- 
what depressed — ^partly because the Colonel 
would never prune the roses any more, and 
partly because he, being in his sixtieth year, 
could not get the Recruiting OflScer to believe 
that he was under thirty-five. The chauflFeur, 
another old soldier, twenty years the junior of 
the man with the sp^lli rejoined; and . 
daughter of the house acted as coachman, driv- 
ing daUy an ancient cob into the town and out 
again. 

We went down to see the wife of the gar- 
dener in the lodge. 

One of her sons, a sergeant in the Artillery, 
had been home on his seventy-two hours' leave. 

"Willie's gone back, sir," she said. "I don't 
think he wanted to go. He's a man of peace 
reelly, our Will is." 

We are all that to-day — ^we of the countries 
west of the Rhine. 

And that is why we are at war. 



THE SHADOW 

LONDON was in the grip of three epi- 
demics — ^influenza, measles, and, not 
least, the War. 

Each of the three made a heavy demand 
upon the nursing community ; and when I went 
to the telephone and asked Dr. Muir if he could 
send a nurse, I was pleased when he answered 
in his curt Scotch way- 

"Certainly. 1*11 send one round at once." 

An hour later the maid announced that the 
nurse had come. 

She proved a slight young woman with a 
deliciously rustic air; and she told me that she 
nursed only for Dr. Muir. 

Then she disappeared into her room, to 
emerge again in a few moments white-aproned, 
in blue uniform, with a sensible cap without 
tails. 

A more English girl it was impossible to 
conceive; with honest plain grey eyes, a scoop- 
nose, and that wonderful air of simplicity and 

61 



62 THE BROWN MAKE 

integrity that had first struck me. A creature 
more natural, sturdy, and honest, it would have 
been hard to find. 

Nurse Merton was a Guernsey girl, it 
seemed, one of a family of seven. In her girl- 
hood she had never dreamed of nursing heroes 
— indeed, she was altogether too practical to be 
very romantic; but when her father fell ill, in 
her sensible way she undertook the duty near- 
est to hand. After his death, when she found 
she had to provide for herself, she adopted 
without either reluctance or desire the profes- 
sion in which she had now some little experi- 
ence. She crossed the water, came to Lon- 
don, and joined a hospital; but through all 
her moving experiences in the great city she 
kept the stubborn prejudices and sound good 
sense of the country girl, adding to them of 
necessity something of the worldly wisdom and 
the judgment that comes from contact with 
all sorts of men in all kinds of conditions. 

After she had earned her certificate, she had 
met Dr. Muir, who had asked her to nurse for 
him. And it was indirectly thtough the long 
Scotch doctor that the experience of her life 
had come. 



THE SHADOW 68 

In August and September Dr. Muir left 
London always for his holiday. At the end of 
July last a matron who was running a nursing 
home in Paris asked Nurse Merton if she would 
care to undertake a case out there, while her 
doctor was away. She had never seen Paris ; 
had a poor opinion of the French, very poor, 
and went — on July 28th. 

There was talk of war at the time ; but then 
in Nurse Merton's twenty-six years' ex- 
perience of life there was always talk of war; 
and she let 'em talk. 

In the Paris home there were two or three 
niu*ses, one a young Scotch woman, attending 
some typhoid cases. Busy at her work, she 
didn't see much of Paris in those early days; 
and what she did see she didn't like. 

The French women were not like English 
women; and they should have been. 

They were got up! 

On August 2nd, Germany declared war. 

And in the twinkling of an eye Paris 
changed. 

It became a city of women, who wept ; and 
of men, who hurried oflF to the Front. The 
composed English nurse watched with critical 



64 THE BROWN MARE 

interest the frivolous capital in the first throes 
of its contact with reality. 

It seemed to her a city balanced on a pow- 
der-barrel which might explode at any mo- 
ment. The Parisians were furiously excited — 
and no wonder. 

Above all they were panting for a row — ^a 
row at all costs. And there were rows — every- 
where; small rows: black knots of people at 
every street-comer centring round a row. 
Nobody ever knew what the row was about. 
That didn't matter. It was a row; and it was 
well. People gathered all day and night in 
the streets, outside the shops, on their door- 
steps, and watdbed the rows come to a head and 
dissipate again. In those days the beds of 
Paris knew no occupants. Men and women 
prowled about with fierce, terrible eyes. 
There were spies everywhere — ^and of com-se 
traitors. Even the milk of the children had 
been poisoned! Therefore every shop of every 
foreigner must be wrecked. A has lea Strarir 
gersi was the cry. 

In those days you must speak French ; and 
you must look French too — or gare a vous! 



THE SHADOW 66 

Those were terrible times for the foreigners ; 
and especially for the English. 

Were the English going to fight? 

Were they going to betray their ally . . . 
once more? 

And the general impression was that they 
were. 

And if they did, . . . 

SaxyrS cceurt 

It was not pleasant to be an English girl in 
Paris in those first days. 

Even unruffled Margaret Merton felt so 
much. 

She and her Scotch colleague did not keep 
their rooms, however. They walked the 
streets discreetly and with downward eyes, 
seeing aU, saying nothing, lest their speech 
should betray them. 

The men had gone. Communications were 
difficult. Taxis and fiacres were being used 
for transport purposes. Trams and metros 
were few and uncertain, and run in the main 
by women. Food was at famine price, es- 
pecially meat. The city was put on rations. 
No man or woman might buy more than a cer- 



66 THE BROWN MARE 

tain fixed amount. So the wealthier families 
sent out each member of the family, one by one, 
to buy the maximum permitted. Food was 
hoarded ; prices rose ; and there was no money. 

Then the sister of the home summoned her 
staff, and told them they were free to go — ^un- 
paid. She could take no further responsibil- 
ity for them. 

Nm-se Merton asked for her last week's sal- 
ary. 

'^I haven't got it," said the sister. 

**Can I have my fare back to England? — 
fifty-three francs." 

"I've only twenty francs in the world," the 
sister answered. "You can't take the little I 
have. You've enough of your own to take you 
home." 

It was true. And the same thing was hap- 
pening throughout Paris. Dependents were 
being dismissed on every side — ^unpaid. 

Nurse Merton went out to find the walls 
posted with a proclamation ordering aU women 
to leave the town. 

But the stubborn English girl would not ad- 
mit defeat as yet. 

She went to see the head of the British Red 



THE SHADOW 67 

Cross. He was somewhat amused with her 
sang-froid in the tumult. 

"What do you want?" he asked. 

"I want to go to the Front," she answered. 

**Wait here twenty-four hours, and you'll 
, be all right," came the grim reply. 

"What do you mean?" 

"The Front will be here to-morrow." 

"In Paris?" 

"AU over it." 

It was the general belief. 

Nurse Merton was not dismayed. She went 
on to the American Ambulance, Lycee Pas- 
teur. 

Did they want nurses — for nothing? 

Did they not! 

Here at last was hope : here was help — ^to be 
given and received. The American Colony in 
Paris had been at work from the first. With 
limitless energy and enthusiasm they had set 
themselves to face an unprecedented situation. 
They might not fight for the cause in which 
they believed; but they might succour the men 
who were fighting in that cause. 

They mu»t have a hospital — of their own — 
and the best in Paris — at once. 



68 THE BROWN MARE 

Somehow they commandeered, leased, 
hought outright, hegged, or borrowed a vast 
skeleton edifice that was in the process of build- 
ing. The roof was on ; the walls were up ; and 
that was all. The very floors were not so much 
as down. 

Into that gaunt hulk of a building those cit- 
izens of the country of Eternal Hope poured 
men and money. All through those August 
days they worked with deliberate fury. . . . 
The Germans are coming. ... The Germans 
were there. . . . German aeroplanes were 
dropping bombs in the next street. . . . Ger- 
man guns could be heard outside the gates of 
Paris. . • . That didn't matter. Nothing 
mattered — except the turning of this hulk into 
a hospital. 

And it was done at last. The skeleton be- 
gan to be clothed with flesh. Floors were 
down; bathrooms built. An X-ray room was 
added, and an operating theatre with a ster- 
ilizer — such a sterilizer! Even a little diet- 
kitchen was not omitted. 

Wards emerged out of the void — ^thirty-five 
beds to a ward, trim and comfortable, awaiting 
occupants. And in the wards American doc- 



THE SHADOW 69 

tors and American and English nurses worked, 
making ready. 

They worked. While Liege and Namur 
fell; while the Expeditionary Force landed, 
and Belgimn was drowned in blood; while the 
grey Pickelhaubes swept on to the walls of 
Paris, they worked. 

Early in September they were ready — ^just 
in time. For the men from the Marne began 
trickling into Paris in dusty motor-ambu- 
lances that bore them straight from the field 
to the hospitals : Englishmen in khaki, crimson- 
trousered French, brown men of the desert, and 
black men from beyond. 

Day and night they trickled in. The order- 
lies met them at the doors of the hospital and 
unshipped them from the ambulances. And 
the orderlies were English in the main — so- 
ciety men simple Nurse Merton thought: one 
of them even a baron; Club men, Piccadilly 
loafers who had never worked before. They 
worked now. All roxmd the clock they 
worked; and it was real work — ^work for men. 
They received the woxmded at the door and car- 
ried them in. Close to the door was a bath- 
room. There, if it was in any wise possible, 



70 THE BROWN MARE 

the orderlies bathed them. If they were past 
that they were carried straight on into the 
wards and laid down, bloodyfgrimy, torn, in 
their dusty brown uniforms or stained crim- 
son trousers, on green tarpaulins that covered 
the beds and prevented the sheets being soiled. 

And there all that the love and skill and 
care of Anglo-Saxon men and women could 
do was done. 

At first the woxmded came in all day and all 
night. Then Paris, always a city of moods, 
the woman among capitals, and a neurotic 
woman at that, began to get an attack of 
nerves. 

There were so many — so many. . . • 

Would they never cease? 

C^est affreux! — efroyablel 

Why was there War at all? 

Who wanted War? 

And after that the wounded came in by 
night only; the ambulances stealing down the 
darkened streets, watched here and there by a 
haggard woman from behind a blind, but in the 
main unseen. 

There were men dying horribly from tet- 
anus; men whose wounds had already con- 



THE SHADOW 71 

tracted the mysterious and terrible gas-gan- 
grene; men from the trenches hit in the head 
and in fits; men caught in the open and 
wounded in the legs from hail of shrapnel. 

There was nothing that love could oflFer, 
money buy, or skill ensure, that was withheld 
from their charges by those kind Ameri- 
cans. 

And the death-sentence in that hospital was 
always passed in words that summed up the 
spirit of the place. 

"Give him champagne," it ran. 

The same illimitable loving-kindness was 
extended to all — Germans included. 

For there were three Germans in one of the 
small rooms. They talked German to them- 
selves; and one of the nurses knew German^ 
and they didn't know she knew it. They were 
not nice men, she reported. 

Nurse Merton was glad she did not have the 
nursing of them. 

"Of course, I should have done it if I'd been 
ordered to — but ..." 

The word, and the snap with which she said 
it, was evidence enough of what she felt about 
it and them. 



7« THE BROWN MARE 

The Grermans were not in the hospital for 
long. 

Somehow the Algerians got to hear that 
there were boches under the same roof — trois 
officiers boches! — hst! — in the little room above 
the diet'Jdtchen. And they whispered among 
themselves. . . . When they got about again. 
... True, Yussuf had only one leg now, but 
he had his hands — long and strong and brown. 
And Suleiman was blind, but Yussuf could 
lead him; and Suleiman had his hands too. 
And Ibrahim, who had no hands now, had feet, 
big and booted, and teeth. . . . 

It was thought well to remove the boches be- 
fore the Algerians quitted bed. 

It was not till the wounded were well enough 
to get up, and begin to hobble about the ward, 
that Nurse Merton saw War as it was and im- 
derstood it. 

Then it came to her in a flash. 

She was used to sick men, used to wards, 
used to accidents. But in the hospitals to 
which she was accustomed men as a rule when 
well enough to move about were through their 
troubles and almost whole again. It was dif- 



THE SHADOW 78 

f erent here. Here you had giants, staggering 
about the wards, blinded for ever and not by 
accident ; young men who wotdd live, or rather 
not succeed in dying, for another sixty years; 
lithe and beautiful lads who would be helpless 
and hideous for the rest of their lives. And 
they were not the victims of disease or mis- 
chance. That was the point. They were the 
victims of the deliberate malice of men, or- 
dered on a gigantic scale. 

It was then that this calm, grey-eyed young 
English woman began to imderstand the Spirit 
of Hate that seethed upon every side of her — 
aye, and in her own despite, to enter into it. 

The woman in her — ^the potential mother of 
men — ^blazed furiously within at the waste and 
the wickedness of it all. 

Most of all at night, in charge of a ward, 
alone with an auxUiary nurse and an orderly, 
that Spirit possessed her and she understood; 
when suddenly in the silence a bandaged man, 
his black hair a-bristle and the sweat pouring 
down his ashen face, began to scream — 

"Les boches! Les bochesi" 

And the whole ward woke in a moment, 
writhed, and tossed, and peered at the night- 



W THE BROWN MARE 

light, stretching out maimed hands for rifles 
that were not there. 

"Holal" from the man from the Midi. 
"Est-ee-que c*est un assaut?'* 

And the little cockney's terrible cry — 

"My God I 'ave the got us?" 

And then the soothing voice of the big Bre- 
ton artilleryman from the corner-bed — 

"Dormez done, mes enfants. Ce n'est que 
ce pauvre diable d'un Chasseur qui meurt." 

Les Boches! 

That was the name of the hideous Ogre who 
haunted the djring, tormented the living, and 
desecrated the dead; whose shadow lay across 
the face of Eiu*ope ; who had snatched men by 
the million from the plough, the mill, the 
sheepcote, and the practice of the pleasant and 
profitable arts and industries; had taken them 
from playing with their children and chaffing 
their girls and put them to the handling of ma- 
chine-guns and chucking of grenades; had torn 
and twisted comely youths; had gorged on 
women and girls ; and sated his obscene appe- 
tites on children and even animals. 

Les Bochesl 

The name that was a nightmare; that would 



THE SHADOW 76 

haunt the dreams of men for centuries; and 
stamp upon the mind of humanity such an im- 
pression of loathing and despair as Alva and 
the Inquisition had failed to do. 

An atmosphere of hate incredible I 

And because man is in his essence love, the 
strain of living in such an atmosphere for long 
will in the end undo the strongest. 

In time it told even on Niu*se Merton. 

She worked on faithfully till the New Year. 

The back of the business then broken, the 
hospital perfectly organized and volunteers 
ready to take her place, she said good-bye to 
the kind American doctors and nurses, and 
crossed the Channel to England, where under 
grey skies there was time once more to recall 
the daffodils beginning to blow on the hills of 
her native Guernsey, 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 

WHEN George the Fourth, then 
Prince of Wales, designed his 
Pavilion by the sea and turned 
the little fishing-village of Brighthelmstone 
into the fashionable watering-place we now 
know, he never surely dreamed of the use to 
which his great-great-nephew would put its 
halls and gardens a century later 1 

A tall brown stockade surrounds the gar- 
den now. Over it you see the domes and min- 
arets and ornate roofs not of an Eastern 
palace, as you might expect, but of the pleas- 
ure-house of an English King. As we drove 
up to the gate a man in khaki stopped us. 
Then he saw the Doctor sitting at my side and 
saluted. The motor slid on through the gar- 
den and drew up at the entrance. On the 
seats by the lawns under the elms figures were 
sitting, strange indeed and yet not entirely out 
of place in that semi-Oriental environment: 

76 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 77 

men in blue coats and trousers, brown men with 
white pugarees bound about their heads. 
One came hobbling down the path on crutches, 
swinging a foot big as a punching-ball by- 
reason of its bandages. An orderly in khaki 
passed him, shoving a kind of enlarged mail- 
cart such as children use. The orderly, a 
sturdy English youth with the close-cropped 
bullet-head of the private soldier, bore down on 
the back of the mail-cart, tilting up the seat of 
it — to balance his charge. And that charge 
was not a child. At first I thought it was an 
idol ; then it seemed to me a man without legs ; 
finally I recognized it for an Indian soldier 
squatting cross-legged on the seat. 

The Englishman, tilting his brown charge 
and whistling as he came, made down the hill 
under the elms in the February sunshine at a 
little skipping rim. 

He was a small man and merry; thick-set, 
close-knit, with a kind of robin-redbreast cock- 
iness; big red hands, swift to help, grey eyes 
always on the verge of a wink, and lips a little 
grim and masterful, but ready at a moment to 
twist into a whistle or a joke. 

He lacked, perhaps, the dignity and repose 



78 THE BROWN MARE 

of his patient ; yet stamped upon him was that 
solid ugly-comered something which we call 
Character, that has won for him and his fathers 
such Liberty as no other people know and 
suzerainty over the 850 millions in that far 
continent from which the brown man on the 
mail-cart came. 

The little scene compelled my attention; and 
well it might* For it was the sum and the sym- 
bol of one of the strangest and most sig- 
nificant happenings in history: the East, en- 
throned, sheltered, and served by the West, 
which it in its turn had served and sheltered 
with its body and blood. 

The Doctor, a Major for the purposes of this 
War, was beckoning me from the door. I fol- 
lowed him, catching as I entered a glimpse of 
an old board on one side of the entrance. On 
it, painted in letters dingy with the age and 
weather, were the words: — 

Royal Pavilion 

These floors which of old answered to the 
nimble feet of coiui;iers, the swish of ladies* 
skirts, and the music of mazurkas and minuets, 
echoed now to the stump of crutches, the slither 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 79 

of slippered feet, and the shu£3e of carrying 
parties bearing patients to and from the operat- 
ing theatre set up in what was of old, perhaps, 
the royal pantry. 

In the entrance-lobby there was a group of 
brown men. Some were playing cards and 
some were watching the players. With their 
dark faces, the red scarves bound about their 
heads, an occasional crutch, or peep of white 
bandage, they looked like a jolly pack of pi- 
rates out of one of Stevenson's books. But 
surely no cutthroats ever looked quite so 
happy, or grinned with such utter honesty, as 
those ugly little men who sat round the table 
slamming down the cards. 

"GhoorkasI*^ said the Doctor in my ear. 
*'Ripping little beggars! — full of fun — ^and so 
game." 

**TenshonI'* came the voice of on? of the 
men, the English word of command emerging 
droUy from an un-English throat. 

The little group of Mongols, with their high 
cheek-bones, smear of moustaches, and the 
Chinese eyes from which all the fun and friend- 
ship in the world seemed to pour in twinkling 
torrents, rose on their crutches, those of them 



80 THE BROWN MARE 

who could. Those who could not, raised their 
hands in salute as they sat. 

We moved down a long passage in which 
brown men in blue lolled about and limped, and 
white men in brown bustled. 

For in this Hospital with its hundreds of 
beds the nursing is of necessity done by the 
men. 

No woman may touch a patient ; and the few 
sisters on the staflp may not be present in the 
wards during meals, lest their shadows fall 
across the food and defile it. 

In the passage are two trolleys, one labelled 
Hindoo Corn Store, and one Mohammedan 
Corn Store. For in matters great and small 
the British Raj has been faithful. Down to 
the smallest item it has respected the beliefs 
and the traditions of its subjects from the East. 
In the Pavilion-Hospital there are two kitch- 
ens and two stoves. And Mohammedans and 
Hindoos take their food in the certainty that it 
has been prepared in accordance with the im- 
memorial usages of their fathers. 

At the end of the passage a door opened. 

We passed round a screen. 

The Dome at Brighton to-day is such a sight 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 81 

as our fathers never saw, as our children are lit- 
tle like to see again. 

England needs a Wordsworth to wander 
through that maze of beds and strike off his 
impression in an imperishable sonnet. And 
yet perhaps only a Turner could do justice to 
that scene, handing down to our descendants, 
in coloiu*s that will never fade, something of 
the poetry and the passion of this spectacle, so 
pathetic in its immediate significance, so tre- 
mendous in its import to the race, and so up- 
lifting to the heart that feels and the eye that 
sees and understands. 

In that vast gilded room where of old King 
George gossiped, and Fox drank, and Wilber- 
force expounded; where in our time General 
Booth has preached, and Faderewski played, 
and Lloyd Greorge spoken, the floor to-day is 
white with beds. They are under the chande- 
lier, against the organ, on the terrace, beneath 
the balcony — ^flocks of them. And in each 
white bed is a brown face, uplifted to the 
banyan-tree that by a happy accident decorates 
the roof. Men of every race from that great 
continent which thrusts like a heart into the 
Indian Ocean are there ; some dark as Othello, 



82 THE BROWN MARE 

some fair almost as you and I ; some with the 
noses of eagles, some short-faced as pugs; 
clean-shaven and bearded; big men and lit- 
tle; splendid and insignificant; tubby and 
lank. 

At the foot of each bed is hung a board ; and 
on the board is recorded the man's name, regi- 
ment, the nature of his wound, and the 
like. 

As we thread our way amid the beds, the 
inmates look at us with their soft brown eyes, 
so grave, so respectful, so affectionate; and 
their hands go to their foreheads. 

"Salaam, Huzoor." 

"Salaam." 

And they give us the impression that we have 
done them a signal honour in permitting them 
to make of their bodies a living sacrifice for 
us and ours. 

We move from bed to bed. 

Here a splendid young Sikh, his hair a-loose 
from its rings and flowing about his neck in 
glorious black rivulets, is re-winding his long 
pugaree. 

There a Ghoorka boy, aged eighteen, oiling 
his scalp-lock, grins at us like a friendly bull- 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 88 

pup as we pass. The Dogra in the bed hard 
by handles a little leather purse that lies at 
the bedside and beckons us. 

"Bee-uUet," he says. "Bee-ullef* ; and 
shows us the jagged bit of copper that the 
Doctor has extracted from his body. 

Under the chandelier a tall man, with both 
hands bandaged and in splints, is standing by 
a bed. In it a soldier in a skidl-cap, with a 
sombre Afghan type of face, sits up erect and 
appears to be praying. He is the one man 
in the Hospital with a grievance. And this is 
his grievance: that he saw the man who shot 
him, and they carried him away before he could 
deal with his enemy. But some day he is go- 
ing back— to find his man: during the war, if 
Grod wills: and if not after. But he is going 
back. It is not Grcrmany he has anything 
against, it is one 6erma^. 

In the comer-bed by the door is a convales- 
cent. For all his flowing beard and air of dig- 
nity he is a joker, and has gathered about him 
a knot of others lured by the laughter. He 
points them out to us with pride, telling oflF 
their nationalities. 

"Jat — ^Dogra — Pathan." 



84 THE BROWN MARE 

''Is that man a Fathan?'' asks the Doctor, 
surprised. 

The others nod. 

"But where are his ringlets?*' 

*'Me old Pathan," explains the object of at- 
tention, and somehow between them they made 
us understand that it is only the young bloods 
who sport ringlets. 

On the floor, at the bedside, squatting on a 
towel, is a patient figure laboriously cleaning 
his teeth with a bone. 

The joker in the bed, who is holding a card- 
board-box in his hand, releases the top. A 
paper snake springs out and coils about the 
neck of the man on the towel, to the delight 
of all. 

Indeed, in spite of the suffering, one is struck 
by the atmosphere of almost childish happiness 
prevailing in the place. 

They know nothing of the greatness of the 
cause in which they have bled; they care lit- 
tie for what we call Democracy, these men of a 
race for ever old and for ever young. Milita- 
rism does not disturb them. They do not trou- 
ble themselves greatly about the rights of 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 86 

smaller States and the sanctity of Interna- 
tional Law. They are willing to trust in the 
judgment of you and me who entered upon 
this War and asked them to bear their heroic 
part in it. They were content to fight be- 
cause we asked them; and now they are con- 
tenttosutfer. It is a triumph of faith. 

Were you to ask them what it is all about 
they would answer you that for a time in the 
bazaar and in the lines there were many 
rumours. Then one day the Colonel- Sahib 
rode on to parade and said — 

"Come, children. The Sirdar calls." 

And they came — across the black waters 
their fathers feared so terribly. 

They came, not as Cromwell's plain russet- 
coated captains came to him, not as the men 
of the North came to Abraham Lincoln, be- 
cause they believed in the cause for which they 
were to fight, but because they believed in the 
men who led them. 

They came, and they fought. These men, 
whose fathers have dwelt for so many ages 
round about the Tropic of Cancer that the 
skins of the children have changed under the 
sun from white to brown, fought under condi- 



86 THE BROWN MARE 

tions which, if they were terrible to the soldiers 
of our race, were to them appalling. They do 
not fear the cold, these men of the Punjab and 
the North- West-Frontier Province and the 
hills beyond. Nights are sharp in the Land 
of the Five Rivers and the frost bites keen in 
the Valley of Peshawur. But they tremble at 
the wet. And as it chanced this was the wet- 
test winter on record. The men of the Bi- 
kaneer Desert, and the gaunt Af ridi hills, and 
the sun-dried plains of the Ganges, fought 
against an enemy they feared far more than 
any Germans — bitter slush up to the knees, 
sleet like arrows of steel, drenching mist, rain 
in torrents loud enough to drown even the roar 
of high-explosive shells; they fought, until 
they were sodden to the bone, and the souls of 
them cried out from the trenches for the sun, 
the sun, the friendly old sun, who had never 
failed them before, and now seemed lost for 
ever in that midnight of murk. 

In spite of the conditions they fought, and 
they fought well. Kitchener has said it in the 
House of Lords, and French in his dispatches. 
For two months, with their faces towards their 
own country and their backs to ours, they held 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 87 

a line which was never dented more than 300 
yards at any spot. 

Returning soldiers say you could always tell 
the trenches held by the Indians, because of the 
silence that prevailed in them. The English 
trenches were always a-buzz : the Tommies, like 
a host of sparrows, chirpy, cheeky, taking oflF 
their superiors surreptitiously, chaffing the 
G»»«Jover the way. chipping each ler. 
The Indians did not talk : they did not dream. 
They stood in the wet and died — ^without com- 
plaints but without enjoyment. When their 
white officers said *Tollowl" they rose and 
followed. When there were no more sahibs to 
follow they stood until, undermined by frost- 
bite, they fell on their faces in the mud and 
were carried over the sea to the Hospital pro- 
vided for them by the Emperor who inspected 
them on the plains below the Palace of Delhi 
three years ago. 

And here they are happy. There is no 
question about it. It may be that throughout 
the Western world to-day it is in the Hospitals 
rather than elsewhere that the peace which 
passeth all understanding is to be found. Cer- 



88 THE BROWN MARE 

tainly it is so here. These Indians in England 
are not in exile. At least, if they are home- 
sick they do not show it. Amid those hun- 
dreds, lying maimed beneath the Dome, thou- 
sands of miles away from their native land, mi- 
der a wintry Western sun, I saw but one who 
seemed unhappy: a young Sikh giant, lying 
with face contorted, and the tears standing on 
his cheeks. 

The men of his race, splendid as himself, 
stood by on crutches, apparently unmoved. 

"Is he very bad?" I asked. 

"No," answered the Doctor. **Hysteria. 
Slight shrapnel wound and frost-bite." 

The man sat up in bed, the tears streaming 
down his face, and in his own tongue made a 
passionate appeal to the Doctor. 

His fellow-countrymen stood by with down- 
ward eyes, half -ashamed, half -amused. 

One of the few sisters steps forward to ex- 
plain. 

"I called him a baby," she said, "and the men 
have been teasing him." 

The Doctor passes on with a little smile ; and 
when we return a few minutes later the man is 
out of bed chaffing another patient. 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 89 

All the Sikhs are not like that. Indeed, of 
the various races represented here they im- 
press the stranger most by reason of their noble 
stature and bearing. And it is curious to re- 
call that it is but a few decades since the fa- 
thers of these men who are fighting our battles 
in Flanders were following the Lion of the 
Punjab in vain assault on the British line at 
Sobraon and Chillianwallah and Goojerat. 

They are men of religion and the sword, 
now as then. Like the Nazarenes of old, they 
never shave the head nor touch strong 
drink. 

To the practical Western spirit their faith- 
fulness has its disadvantages. 

One man had a depressed fracture which re- 
sulted in paralysis of the arm. 

In the Pavilion-Hospital every patient is 
free — free to die if he prefers it to an opera- 
tion. 

The situation was explained to the patient. 
An operation on the head could cure him of 
his paralysis. 

Would he have it done? 

Would he have to be shaved, O Savioiu* of 
the Poor? 



90 THE BROWN MARE 

No; but in the course of the operation it 
might be that some of his hair would be cut. 

Then he would not be done. 

"Why not?" 

**It is against my religion, Huzoor. Pa- 
thans shave their heads; Sikhs never. What 
says the Guru?'* 

And he is paralysed still. 

As we passed slowly on a face in a bed be- 
neath the balcony drew me. It was dark, 
bearded, and full of pain. The man was lying 
on his back, and from the way he swayed his 
head it was clear to me that he could not move 
his body ; and the reason too seemed clear, for 
his feet appeared to be contained in a kind of 
barrel, concealed beneath the sheets, which it 
hiunped and rounded. 

As I moved, the man's eyes followed me. 

I looked at the board at the foot of the bed, 
and read the fatal and frequent legend. 

Frost-bite in both feet. 

Something drew me to him ; something drew 
him to me. Our eyes met and called. I went 
to his bedside. 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 91 

He was a Punjabi Mohammedan and could 
talk a few words of English. Leaning a lit- 
tle out of bed he drew his hand across my shin- 
bone about six inches above the ankle, with a 
gesture horrible in its significance. 

"Froz-bite," he said. "Operation." 

"Better now?" I asked. 

He rolled his head about, his eyes clouded 
with pain. 

"Leedly better now. One, two, three oper- 
ation." 

I asked him when he would be going back to 
India. 

He didn't know. 

"My job horses. . . . India-rubber leg." 

I asked no more; and he spoke to me of 
Ferozabad "in U. P.," where he had lived, and 
Mhow where he had been quartered, and the 
ammunition column to which he had belonged. 

Did I know Amritsar? 

Yes; I knew Amritsar, and the Golden Tem- 
ple, and the Holy Book. 

Amritsar was the home of the Sikh Gurus. 
Doubtless Lon on would be the home of the 
Gurus of the Sahibs. I would be a Guru 
from Lon'on? Was it not so? Clearly: for 



98 THE BROWN MARE 

I had a beard. No Sahib had a beard unless 
he was a Guru. Would I, the Guru from 
Lon'on, so wise and world-famous, take two 
biscuits from Ali Mahomed, the driver in the 
ammunition column? 

As I left him clutching the English comic 
paper somebody had given him, he said, with 
the insinuating courtesy of the East— 

"You come again. Not to-morrow. No. 
three — four day. Friday." 

His face was still with me as I quitted the 
Dome — dark-eyed, patient, full of pain, and 
above all familiar. I had seen it somewhere 
before, I was sure — in the Louvre, perhaps; 
crowned, I think, with thorns. 

We passed out into the garden in the Feb- 
ruary sunshine. 

Beyond the high brown palisade the trams 
were sliding up and down Pavilion Parade; 
and along the top of the trams you could read 
the advertisement boards of an old and vul- 
garized civilization that died suddenly of shock 
early in August last. 

The reminder that Tamplin's Ales are the 
best. Is. 6d. the bottle, and that Selfridge's 



THE INDIAN HOSPITAL 93 

is the shop for outfits, comes to you as out of 
another world. And the men and women on 
the roofs of those moving trams, most of them 
immersed in green or pink afternoon papers, 
seem scarcely aware that one world is falling 
into ruins about their ears and another spring- 
ing out of those ruins. Hardly do they trou- 
ble to glance over the palisade and see the 
process of the miracle going on apace within. 

I turn and look back at the buUding. 

On the balcony, overlooking the lawn, are 
other convalescents. A young and very hand- 
some Rajpoot waves to me. I have never 
seen him before. He has never seen me. 
But he waves to me ; and I wave back. 

Then a bullet-headed British orderly takes 
his place on the balcony beside the Rajpoot, 
and winds his arm about the shoulder of the 
son of a hundred kings. 

And thinking of those two on the balcony, 
with their heads in such close conjunction, I 
have hardly a glance for the magnificent Sikh 
Havildar with the beard twisted about his ears, 
who salutes us at the gate as we go out. 



THE CONSCRIPT 

HIS little round cap lay in the hall, blue 
beside the brown one of the Doctor- 
Ma jor» as I came down the stairs. 

I entered the drawing-room. 

It was a curious scene, such as you may come 
upon anywhere in England to-day: two ladies 
in evening-dress, standing by the fire, a man 
in khaki, and that other. 

A slight, pathetic figure in his plain uniform 
of the conscript, he made: the small blue coat 
with the brass buttons, the red thread round 
each sleeve, flannel trousers of that peculiar 
grey which we associate with young men at 
Oxford and Cambridge, and boots, solid 
enough, it is true, but of the kind that have 
clearly been tiu-ned out by the hundred-thou- 
sand. 

He was quite a boy, not more than nineteen 
at the most, his hair brushed back from his 
forehead in the straight style, guiltless of part- 

94 



THE CONSCRIPT 95 

ing, that would have betrayed him to any Eng- 
lishman as a foreigner; and there was some- 
thing shy yet ardent about him. 

He was a boy; but he should have been a 
girl. And it needed only a glance at his dark 
eyes, full of fire, hirnioiu*, and hope, to see that 
he was one of the sensitive of earth — ^a poet in 
embryo, maybe. Indeed, he made at once the 
appeal of that which is patient and at the same 
tune brave. He was a Spirit— so much was 
clear. That is to say, he could suflFer. And 
he had suffered, as his story showed, and had 
emerged from the bottomless pit unconquer- 
able still — ^by no means a hero, but a human 
being who could enjoy life and laugh about it. 
His erect, sprightly figure, his sensitive, swift 
face, his little rounded chin, his girlish mouth, 
his white, delicate hands, and above all his 
eyes, told the same tale. There burned in him 
still the Flame of Youth and Hope and Joy 
unending. Men and Circumstance had tried 
to put them out, and had failed. This boy, for 
all he had been through, was still a boy. He 
could laugh, and he did laugh. Indeed, 
throughout dinner and after, h,e flowed forth in 
one continuous delicious babble, breaking for 



96 THE BROWN MARE 

ever into little cataracts of mirth. That was 
his triumph; and the triumph of Nature, which 
had made him at once so infinitely sensitive to 
impression and so capable of recovery when 
seemingly broken for ever. 

Certainly if ever there was an organism not 
devised for the battle and the trench and the 
brutalities of war, it was this little Belgian boy. 
His place was in the studio, the laboratory, the 
library, moving among ideas, somewhat remote 
from the crude fisticuffs of the life of action; 
a lad this, clearly, to be loved by women, 
spoiled perhaps by them; misunderstood, 
avoided, tolerated by the average man. . . . 
In a word, he was the Eternal artist. And it 
was this refined and delicate creature whom the 
Monster of Militarism had swallowed whole 
and prostituted to its own terrible pur- 
pose. 

His coimtry had stood out against the Mon- 
ster long after it had engulfed neighbouring 
France and Gtermany. Till a few years back 
the Belgian rabbit had stolidly refused to be 
swallowed by the Python of to-day. Then 
the Shadow of Death, creeping out of the 
East, always more ominous, had compelled the 



THE CONSCRIPT 97 

stubborn little land to submit to what seemed 
inexorp^ble necessity. Belgimn girded her re- 
luctant sword about a waist that many years 
of comfort and good-living had not left slim. 

She raised an Army — at first by ballot. 
But the ballot, so the laughing boy told us, 
was not satisfactory. There was corruption, 
gross and obvious. The poor suflFered; the 
rich escaped ; the honest were indignant. And 
after that as the Shadow of Death from the 
East came always closer and grew always 
more ominous, there was Universal Service. 

Our boy did not escape, nor, to be just, did 
he wish to. A native of Liege, he was a 
student at the University there, and became in 
due course a foot-soldier *'dans la compagnie 
de rUniversit^." 

As a student he had only to do fifteen 
months' service, and I am sure he did not take 
his soldiering very seriously. Indeed, I do not 
think Fran9ois took anything more seriously 
than was good for him just then. Why should 
he? He was young enough to be sure that 
Youth would never pass away — from him at 
all events. He was as full of frolic as an 
April lamb. And he was a Liegois and a 



98 THE BROWN MARE 

learned man in the making, dabbling deli- 
ciously in science and letters. 

His must have been an ideal life in that busy, 
prosperous, old-world town on the frontier. I 
do not suppose the boy bothered his young 
head greatly about the Shadow advancing al- 
ways from the East, over which his father and 
the older men shook bald heads of Sunday eve- 
nings as they drank their cafe and sucked their 
cigars. He had most of the things that make 
life delightful for a boy: abroad his Univer- 
sity, at home, father, mother, and little sister 
Julie. An ideal life in the little town of an 
ideal land. And as we dined, and the boy 
chattered gaily on in his naif, delightful way, 
he gave us gleams of a country that, to the 
sophisticated West, sounded almost like Fairy- 
land. 

The Queen of that land was ill, it seemed, 
at one time ; and everybody loved her and was 
very sorry — ^Fran9ois and little sister Julie by 
no means least. So the boy and girl must 
needs sit down and write to their Queen — 
"une charmante lettre, s'il vous plait, Mon- 
sieur, tout-a-fait charmante." 

He said it so seriously and at the same time 



THE CONSCRIPT 99 

with such clear recognition of the humour of 
the remark, that we accepted it in twinkling 
silence. 

And if you please the Queen wrote back 
herself to her faithful Fran9ois and Julie — 

"Une lettre, aussi charmante, s'il vous platit, 
Monsieur." 

After this it was not surprising to be told 
that the King of such a country is just like 
everybody else. 

"No state — ^point du tout." 

He comes out of his palace and walks about 
the market-place, buying his own "bacca"; 
and you meet him, and rub shoulders and take 
off yoiu* hat, and say — 

"Bon jour, votre Majeste." 

And he answers — 

"Bon join*, Monsieur." 

It sounds like an idyll; and it is true. 

It seemed almost redundant to ask him if 
such a King was beloved; but I did so. And 
the answer, with a smile and a little shake of 
the head, rewarded if it surprised me. 

"No, Monsieur, he is not beloved. Before 
the War he was beloved. To-day he is 
adored'* 



100 THE BROWN MARE 

That was how things had been. 

Then suddenly they changed. 

The Shadow that had been creeping up 
from the East for two generations suddenly 
launched forward and overwhelmed the land. 
All was pitch darkness; and in the darkness 
there came thq sound of seven million men, 
women, and children, holding their breath and 
waiting for the thunderbolt to be hurled. 

The moment passed; and in the darkness 
the seven million woke and wrought fever- 
ishly. 

Day and night, without sleep, they wrought. 

Fran9ois, the little student, left the lecture- 
room, ceased his tennis with Juhe, and his fool- 
ing with his fellow-students, and joined his 
company. He was a foot-soldier in earnest 
now. For four days and nights he worked — 
how he worked 1 The delicate hands, used to 
wielding a singularly graceful pen and turn- 
ing the leaves of Verhaeren's poems, were en- 
gaged now in desperate navvy work. Liege 
was being put into a condition of defence. All 
day Francois carried railway sleepers, which 
were used in building earth-works. 

'*They were heavy. Monsieur — ^too heavy." 



THE CONSCRIPT 101 

By day and night that slight student la- 
boured under his new burthen with others in 
his company. 

His oflScers were kind men and brave — maia 
pas experimenU, si vous comprenez. Mon- 
sieur. They did not even know how to build 
trenches. That they learned later — from the 
English. 

Then one night, as they tried to sleep 
amongst their raw, unfinished work, Fran9ois 
heard far overhead a faint tap — ^tapping. He 
said to his sergeant, rolled in a blanket at his 
side — 

"What's that?" 

The sergeant answered — 

"Aeroplane." 

But Francois, the wise, knew better. 

"Zeppelin,'* he said. 

And as he said it a searchlight was turned 
on to the sky, and they saw une inorme cigare 
sail by above them. 

TSText day the thunderbolt fell. 

There were marchings and counter-march- 
ings. To Francois at least it seemed that a 
battle was the strangest kind of muddle; but 
the work was not so hard as that carrying of 



102 THE BROWN MABE 

sleepers that preceded it. He was busy and 
excited ; too busy to go and inquire how it fared 
with Papa and Mama and Julie, too excited 
even to think very much of them. 

Then the retreat began. Francois was in 
the 11th Infantry. His was the last company 
to leave. Whether it was the duty of his com- 
pany to cover the retreat or not he didn't 
know. He only knew it was all very terrible. 
There were no officers and no orders. Broken 
units, hopelessly intermingled, poured along 
the road that ran beside the railway towards 
Brussels. 

And the retreat continued day after day 
from one town to the next — in at night, out 
next morning. 

But in spite of it all there was always hope 
in the heart of the defeated. 

"Toujours — ^toujours — toujours !" 

It was a nightmare shot with gleams. 

Finally Fran9ois found himself at Antwerp 
— Anvers he calls it. 

By this time his highly strung organization 
had been strained to breaking-point. Hap- 
pily in Anvers he found a Liege doctor work- 
ing in the hospitals. Fran9ois was employed 



THE CONSCRIPT 108 

as an orderly and was only in the trenches once 
or twice. And he was glad: he told us all 
about it in the frankest way. It was not pleas- 
ant in those trenches — ^by no means. If you 
put your head above them only so much it was 
bad for yoiur head! And it grew worse as the 
days went on. 

Round Anvers ran two ceintures — earth- 
works with barbed-wire entanglements and the 
like. The Germans brought up guns ; and the 
shells from those guns flew both ceintures and 
landing in the town set fire to it. 

The position became impossible; and the 
Army retreated to Ostend. 

rran9ois went by hospital-train. 

"C'etait plus comfortable, je vous assure," 
he told us with a delightful little giggle. 

At Ostend the Army reorganized and Fran- 
9ois rejoined his company. 

He was back in the trenches, sleeping in 
them, head in hands, somewhere in the neigh- 
bourhood of Dixmude. 

One morning his company was ordered to 
advance. 

They started through the town, which was 
being shelled. As they cleared the church, 



10* THE BROWN MARE 

half the company bolted. The other half went 
on. 

They reached the outskirts of the town. 
Before them was the enemy's position. 

"There's no point in all of us getting killed," 
said the captain, who was something of a 
philosopher. "No. 2 section stay behind; No. 
1 section come with me." 

Fran9ois was in No. 1 section. 

They advanced at the double across the 
open. 

Suddenly they heard a sound like an enor- 
mous swarm of bees buz-z-zing straight at 
them. 

"C'6tait un obusl" 

Down they went on their faces. The shell 
exploded behind them. No one was hit. 

Forward once more! 

Again that monstrous buz-z-zl 

Down they went again — all but rran9ois. 

He tells the tale with rivulets of laughter, 
delighting in it. 

"Me, I could not. I stood erect — nerfs 
tendus. I knew that shell was for me — for 
me — only for me — oibsolumentr 

Poor rran9ois! all but his body, stiff with 



THE CONSCRIPT 106 

fright, had collapsed. The Man of Imagina- 
tion suffered where the Men of Earth won 
through. 

He was the one man hit — ^in the head and 
arms. 

The rest fled like ants. 

Two men came back and carried him to a 
cattle-shed in which were other wounded. An 
English doctor, wounded himself, tended him. 

Fran90is was put on an ambulance in a long 
convoy. A German shell killed the horses in 
the next ambulance. 

"C'etait le signal de depart!" tittered Fran- 
9ois. 

He was bumped along to Calais ; and from 
Calais taken to Southampton. The voyage 
took forty-eight hours ; and there was nothing 
to eat or drink. One wounded man gave 
Fran9ois a biscuit and tended him. Otherwise 
he would have died. 

When he reached the hands of the Doctor- 
Major he was in a terrible condition, not so 
much from his wounds as from nervous ex- 
haustion. 

And even now he is not himself. 

"I cannot study. Monsieur le Docteur," he 



106 THE BROWN MARE 

complains. "Directly I try my head goes 
romid. Also I have indigestion, Monsieur le 
Docteur. And I have a pain here, . • .'* 

And he recomits his S3rmptoms one by one 
before us all. 

But since he has been in England Fran9ois 
has had his little triumphs. 

The King and Queen came down to see him 
and his wounded compatriots. 

rran9ois tells the story as always with gusto 
and wit. 

They were all formed up in the hospital ; and 
a little sergeant, full of himself, strutted into 
the ward with his chest out, and shouted — 

"His Majest-ee!" 

The King followed, walking with great dig- 
nity, and very slow ; and spoke to Francois. ' 

"You are wounded in the arm, I hear?" 

"Yes, Sire." 

"Are you happy in England?" 

And F'ranfois answered with a little speech 
that surely was inspired. 

"I am not happy in exile, your Majesty. 
But when I leave England I shall do so as 
sorrowfully as when I left Belgium." 



THE CONSCRIPT 107 

After the King came the Queen. 

''I was not afraid of the King, but I was 
afraid of her," Fran9ois confesses. "EUeavait 
la figure severe — ^tres severe." 

But she asked him after his people, and 
whether he had brothers and sisters. And he 
told her about Julie ; and they were friends at 
once. ' 

Indeed, there is only one shadow over the 
life of Fran9ois to-day, and that concerns his 
little sister. 

His father and mother are still in what re- 
mains of Liege, and so is Julie. The father 
and mother will stay where they are whatever 
comes; but Julie, who is seventeen, must be 
smuggled across the frontier at any cost be- 
fore the Great Retreat begins. 

Belgium has known Prussia in attack; and 
Belgium has to know Prussia in retreat, and 
Belgium is not looking forward to the expe- 
rience. 

The conscript has risen, and with his man- 
ners of a little gentleman is thanking infinitely 
Monsieur le Docteur and his lady for their hos- 
pitality. 



108 THE BROWN MARE 

But as he goes out, the two brass buttons 
shining solitary in the hoUow of his erect young 
back, it seems to me that it is rather to him 
that our infinite thanks are due. 



THE MAN IN COMMAND 



WAR, if it tries the men, proves the 
women no less. It has always 
been so. The horn, blowing the 
warriors of the tribe to battle of old, called 
the women away from the wattled hut, the 
distaff, and the children, to the handling of the 
plough and the driving of the mattock. 

And Englishmen, who for a generation had 
been waging against men the most ferocious 
and pertinacious campaign in history, at the 
first tap of the drum abandoned their struggle 
for rights to take up duties forsaken by their 
soldier-mates. 

The change amounted almost to a miracle. 

It was as though a regiment of troop-horses, 
stampeding in the lines, had, despite them- 
selves, fallen into the ranks at the sound of 
the trumpet. 

In the days to come, when the Final Peace 
has been established, a poet will sing or an 

109 



110 THE BROWN MARE 

historian record the part that women played 
in the Great War which made that Peace pos- 
sible. 

To us in England during the last year the 
change has come so gradually as to be less per- 
ceptible than to a stranger arriving suddenly 
in our midst. 

But still, in absent moods, you can catch 
yourself surprised to find at the barrier in the 
railway station, on lifts at stores, behind the 
coimter of the bank, the face of a woman greet- 
ing you. 

And it is not only the girls of the working- 
class who have taken up the burden laid upon 
them by their country. 

Women are farming the lands, and running 
the estates of men who are hanging on by the 
skin of their teeth to the rocky fringes of the 
Gallipoli peninsula, sweeping the North Sea, 
soaking in the trenches. 

Here, in the heart of Sussex, in almost every 
country-house within hail, a woman to-day 
reigns supreme in the absence of her lord. 

A year ago our chauffeur was an ex-cavalry- 
man. He had been through the siege of Lady- 



THE MAN IN COMMAND 111 

smith and come to us as coachman at the end 
of the war. 

A charming fellow, with a witty tongue 
and a wide experience of life, he had but one 
fault: he was a bad coachman. For years he 
dreamed a dream — ^that the Colonel would 
abandon horses and take to a motor. 

In July of 1914 the miracle, long prayed 
for, and long delayed, took place. The Colo- 
nel bought a car, and Lingfield learned to 
drive. There were few happier men. As he 
sat behind his wheel you saw that he had real- 
ized the ambition of a lifetime. The heir bad 
come into his kingdom at last. 

A month later War was declared; and 
Kitchener appealed to all old soldiers to re- 
join. After a spiritual conflict, the history of 
which wiU never be written, Lingfield an- 
swered the call. He left his wife and chil- 
dren, and above all his car, and went back to 
the colours. 

There was no question of engaging another 
chauffeur. The new car stood unused in the 
coach-house alongside the station-cart. 

In the stable there was left one cob, young 
in years, ancient in appearance and in gait. 



112 THE BROWN MARE 

Miss Kate, the ColoneFs daughter, an ath- 
lete and an artist, abandoned her art and be- 
came coachman. 

Daily she flogged the old-young cob with the 
reluctant soul into the market-town six miles 
away ; shopped, picked up or deposited the rare 
visitors ; and flogged the six miles home again. 

Then the Colonel, who had been failing long, 
began to die. 

His eldest son left for France in October 
in command of the Horse Artillery battery 
his father had commanded thirty years before. 
All through October and November he fought 
with the Immortal Division that had flung it- 
self across the path of the seaward-striving 
barbarians; he fought, his guns in action at 
bow-shot range, to prevent those hordes break- 
ing in on the dying of that old man in that 
lonely house in the Sussex Weald. 

Those were Napoleonic times. An invasion 
was possible and prepared for. 

Miss Kate had her instructions and made 
her arrangements with the bailiff. The cattle 
were to be driven inland to the castle on the 
hill. No living creature was to be left on the 



THE MAN IN COMMAND 118 

f axm. Horses and carts were to be removed. 
What forage could not be taken away was to 
be destroyed. There was to be a vast inland 
trek; and the enemy on landing was to find 
the counties on the coast wasted, as Belgium 
had not been before the war. 

In those days Death crept always closer in 
that upper room. 

Then one night in February the Colonel 
came to grips with his enemy. 

Miss Kate was called up at midnight, har- 
nessed the cob, and drove through the lonely 
country lanes, haunted by creatures of the 
night, to fetch the doctor and bring out cases 
of oxygen. 

There was no man to send; and no maid 
would dare those lan^s. Miss Kate was swift 
and resolute; and time was everything. 

During those last few days those same trees, 
stark against the wandering night, often saw 
the same valiant little figure making the same 
pilgrimage at the same hour. 

Her face, always strong, became more spir- 
itual. 

She was suffering; she was striving; she was 
growing. 



114 THE BROWN MARE 

Just when the stram was worst, Boam, one 
of the men in the garden, asked for a rise in 
wages to meet the enhanced cost of living. 

Miss Kate rated him fm*iously. 

Boam held his peace and withdrew. 

A day or two later the Colonel passed out 
of the sound of the guns He had loved. 

He was carried to church one brilliant March 
morning in one of his own Sussex wains lined 
with moss, and drawn by his own horses: his 
Horse Artillery busby with its nodding plume, 
his sabretache and sword, laid on the simple 
oak coffin. His own men carried him into 
church, and out again, and lowered him into 
the grave. 

There were left three women, and a farm, 
and garden. 

In the garden were two men; on the farm 
three. 

A fortnight after the Colonel's death Boam 
gave notice. 

Miss Kate accepted it; and raised the wages 
of the other men to meet the rising prices. 

Boam's desertion raised the question of the 
cob, for one of his duties had been to groom it. 



THE MAN IN COMMAND 116 

The young cob was growing older every 
day. Always more frequently he tumbled on 
his nose and had to be laid up. And well or 
ill, he must be fed and groomed. Meanwhile 
the big car was standing idle in the coach- 
house ; and friendly neighbours said that it was 
suffering accordingly. 

Now there was an infatuated old dealer who 
every time Miss Kate drove into the market- 
town stopped her and asked if the cob was for 
sale. 

"I'll give you £40 for him," said the dealer. 

"I'm not selling," answered Miss Kate 
firmly. 

When Boam gave notice she reconsidered 
her decision. Finally she sought the old dealer 
out. He renewed his proposal and she ac- 
cepted it. He took the cob ; she pocketed her 
£40 ; and spent some of it on learning to drive 
the car. 

Miss Kate now ceased to be coachman and 
became chauffeur. For many years she had 
been head-gardener and keeper of the orchard, 
taking the prize for apples at the local show. 
And now she added to her labours the super- 
intendence of the farm. 



116 THE BROWN MARE 

There was already a baili£F, and still more 
a bailiff's wife. And they had been there for 
twenty years. The bailiff was a kind man with 
gentle eyes and bracken-colom^ed beard; his 
wife a red-faced termagant, who ruled him with 
tempestuous tongue. 

Twenty years ago King had run the farm 
single-handed. At the time of the Colonel's 
death he had two men imder him ; and the three 
together had done less than the one of old. 
For some years past the Colonel had been fail- 
ing. The men had lain fallow; so had the 
land. 

When Miss Kate took charge she found her- 
self resisted on every side by a dull weight of 
slothful habit. 

j(ill through the winter months the cattle 
were in the yard. She wished to have them 
turned out by day in the fields, as did the 
neighbours. The bailiff shook his head. 

*'Can't do it, miss.'' 

"Why not? Everybody else does." 

**Never did it in the Colonel's time, miss." 

"Well, it's got to be done in mine," said Miss 
Kate sharply. 



THE MAN IN COMMAND 117 

She was masterful and had her way in that 
and every other matter; 

The bailiff didn't like it. 

Miss Kate was genuinely sorry for him. 

For many years he had known no master; 
and now he had a mistress. 

"When the war's over Mr. John'U come back 
and settle down here/' she said one day, to 
comfort him. 

He looked up sharply. 

"What's that?" he said. 

She repeated her remark. 

It was clear that he was not well pleased. 
And later the Colonel's old soldier-servant re- 
ported that the bailiff had boasted at the pub- 
lic-house that Mr. John would never come back 
from the War, from which so few returned. 

He was wrong. Mr. John did come back 
on a few days' leave. 

All the other men on the place were pleased 
to see him. The bailiff was not, and his wife 
still less so. 

Mr. John came — and went; and Miss Kate 
was left in charge. 

From dawn her slight, athletic figure might 



118 THE BROWN MARE 

be seen marching the fields, scythe on shoulder, 
working in the hay, binding the corn, pulling 
a heifer out of the stream, ordering here, stim- 
ulating there, checking somewhere else. And 
at dusk she took her gun and walked the hedge- 
rows, keeping down the rabbits. 

The fields that had fallen into a drowsy sleep 
began to stir again, and the men to move. 

She learned rapidly, gathering the reins of 
government into her hands, and finding out 
things all the time — unpleasant things, many 
of them, which made her unhappy: for the 
bailiff was an old servant, and she had believed 
in him. She had believed in human nature 
too. Contact with the realities of the struggle 
for life brought disillusionment. And when 
her mother asked in despair if there was no 
such thing as an honest human being. Miss 
Kate met her with a grim, dogmatic No. 

The cows, she discovered, were giving only 
a fraction of the milk they should. 

She tackled the bailiff about it. 

"I'm not satisfied," she said. 

To her amazement the man met her with a 
feeble— 

"Don't be 'ard on me, miss." 



THE MAN IN COMMAND 119 

Thereafter, quite suddenly, and for no rea- 
son, the milk-return increased by 60 per cent. 

The bailiff was too simple a soul to be a suc- 
cessful rogue. 

What happened to the surplus milk? 

Miss Kate did not inquire too closely: she 
liked old King too much. 

Then it turned out that Mrs. King was 
charging 2d. a dozen for eggs supplied to the 
house from the farm. 

"Our own eggs, if you please 1" commented 
Miss Kate. 

She stopped that practice summarily. 

Thereafter the bailiff's wife was insolent to 
Miss Kate's mother, a little old lady of nearly 
eighty. That angered Miss Kate. She went 
and talked to the woman. 

**Expect to farm for nothing, I suppose!" 
said the woman impudently. 

**I don't expect to lose £800 a year on the 
farm, Mrs. King," retorted the other. 

Two days later in a sudden fury the bailiff 
gave notice. 

To his obvious surprise it was accepted. 

Miss Kate went round the farm to take the 
inventory. 



120 THE BROWN MARE 

In the scullery was a huge earthenware por- 
ringer. 

Miss Kate looked at it. 

"Useful for butter-making, I suppose/' she 
said. 

The red woman went white. 

She answered nothing. 

A month later, when I returned, the last of 
the com was being carried. 

I went down to the farm. 

Miss Kate was standing on the top of a 
stack in her short skirt, her dog-leash girt about 
her waist, her hair ruddy against the sky. her 
big blue sheep-dog prowling about the foot of 
the stack. A man in the cart below was pitch- 
ing the sheaves up to her; and she was laying 
them methodically. 

That evening I wrote to brother John who 
is still Ypres-way — 

Kate is master of the situation, and thoroughly en* 
joying herself. 



THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 

1 SHALL not easily forget that brilliant 
evening last September when our motor 
climbed the hill out of the town and 
rolled towards the setting sun. 

Beneath us the sea lapped against the white 
cliffs as of old; but the Gap, down which the 
children used to race to the beach, shouting in 
their glee, bristled now with wire entangle- 
ments and was blocked with impediments, 
while at the top was a wooden guard-house, a 
sentry-box, and men on duty. 

Beyond the Gap houses grew scarce. We 
climbed a hill and dropped down a steep pitch. 
At the bottom of the hollow, standing alone, 
was a low, white house with a tiled roof that 
looked like a coastguard station; and beyond 
it across the plough a flint-waU, running down 
to the cliff and enclosing the wooded grounds 
of a great house, blocked the way. 

Against that wall, a hundred yards away, 
paced a man in khaki with a flashing bayonet. 

121 



1«4 THE BROWN MARE 

He was always there, day and night, wet or 
shine. 

You could not get away from him. 

One night when I could not sleep I turned 
on my electric light. The window was wide, 
and the curtains lifted occasionally in the 
wind. 

As I read Motley's Dutch Republic^ draw- 
ing faint comfort from the fact that even the 
Germans had not as yet out-done the Sack of 
Antwerp by the Spanish Furies, I was star- 
tled by a stem and peremptory voice from 
across the paling — 

*Tut out that light, please 1" 

It went out with a snap. 

"Thank you," came the voice out of the 
night; and the man retired across the plough 
to his post beneath the wall. 

All through the winter our lights were the 
Colonel's hobby, his anxiety, and delight. He 
was past soldiering, but his keen spirit drove 
him to do whatever he could do with all his 
might. He was terribly thorough. From 
bathroom, lavatories, passages, and halls the 
bulbs were removed to guard visitors against 



THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 126 

temptation and servants against carelessness. 
You washed in the dark; and you said good- 
bye to your friends by the light of the moon. 
And every night when the blinds were down 
and the curtains drawn^ the Colonel went his 
rounds prowling outside the house to espy if 
there were any crannies through which the 
prisoned light was filtering, and then going 
from window to window indoors, making good. 
And if about the hour of dark you went into 
one of the seaward rooms you would be pretty 
sure to be greeted by a spectral voice from the 
ceiling — 

"I'm not very happy about this curtain." 

And you would be aware of a gaunt and 
vulture-like figure perched on a table or chair, 
safety-pin in mouth, adjusting a chink. 

And there was method in the Colonel's mad- 
ness. For in those days there were eyes every- 
where, in the sky and on the sea, the 
eyes of enemies and of jealously watchful 
friends. 

Day and night the sea was whitened by the 
furious passage of ships driven through the 
foam on some tremendous and mysterious er- 
rand, or darkened by the shadow of merchant- 



186 THE BROWN MARE 

fleets at anchor, stayed by the same invisible 
hand. 

The dockyards of England were belching 
forth streams of the strangest craft that ever 
took the waters; and sooner or later most of 
them came our way, and many others too: 
great grey monitors, steaming to bombard 
Zeebrugge, their single fighting-tops ugly as a 
bunch of mistletoe on a pole; little beetle- 
boats the use of which no man could guess; 
neutral ships with their flags painted hugely 
on their sides; and fleets of mine-sweepers 
from the seaport town beyond the wall. 

Trawlers these last, out to catch other fish 
than herrings. And gallant little craft they 
are. We used to watch them bucketing along 
under the cliff, proud to be King's ships and 
used in the King's service, squadrons of them, 
their three-pounders in their bows, their sweep- 
ii^g-g^Ai* on a boom a-stem, buffeting out at 
dawn and home again at dusk. No weather 
daunts them; and their crews are of the old 
sea-dog stuff. In the steep streets of the little 
seaport town you may meet them : men in great 
sea-boots and tan-coloured breeches, their 
white stockings tucked over their boot-tops, 



THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 127 

rolling along, battered and brown, sometimes 
with earrings in their ears, and always with the 
mark of their calling stamped as clearly upon 
them as had their forefathers in the days of 
Amyas Leigh. They had a rough time in 
those wintry seas too. During the great gale 
in February one of them got her screw over a 
submarine net. She could not clear herself, 
and the seas bombarded her. Slowly she foun- 
dered. The lifeboat put out to the wreck, and 
saved all the crew but one. 

They brought the men in to our little har- 
bour. The Colonel met them as they landed 
and took them into the old Tartar Frigate that 
in its life of centuries has seen many strange 
happenings. 

"Glorious chaps," he reported. **Like pi- 
rates. We put 'em in front of the fire and 
poured whisky down 'em. And they went 
home merry as grigs.'' 

Early in the War Zeppelins raided the sea- 
port town beyond the wall where the mine- 
sweepers find harbourage. 

Indeed, this comer of the coast has been a 
favourite haunt of enemy aircraft, as is after 



1«8 THE BROWN MARE 

I 
I 

all but natural, for it is nearer to the fightings, 
line than any other part of England. 

The sound of guns was in our ears by day 
and night. On the one hand we could hear^ 
the bombardment of the Belgian coast; and 
on the other was the continuing rumble of our 
own big guns being tested at arsenals near by. 
While once on a Sunday afternoon we heard 
the sudden phut-phut of a quick-firer in action 
near by, and running out on to the lawn saw a 
scurrying flotilla of destroyers beating off a 
seaplane attack. 

Perhaps, then, it was little wonder that when 
first we came to the House on the Cliff we 
used to hear the hum of the engines of the Zep- 
pelins overhead every night. They came with 
astonishing regularity at intervals of a quarter 
of an hour and stopped automatically as it 
were and, to be just, somewhat considerately, 
at midnight sharp. We used to lie in bed with 
clenched teeth, grimly enduring. And it was 
not till one day we climbed the hill at the back 
of the house and saw the main road with the 
tall standards of the electric tram running 
along it that we modified our letters to our 
friends. 



THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 129 

When the Zeppelins really passed on their 
way to raid London they passed far out to sea 
over the Goodwins. We did not see them; 
and only the more imaginative heard their en- 
gines. 

There was no imagination, though, about the 
uproar which woke us at midnight on New 
Year's Eve. It came from the sea, and was 
like the sound of a million Leviathans stam* 
peding through the deeps. I crept to the win- 
dow and peeped out. A heavy fog obscured 
the waters. And out of that white darkness 
came those bellowings of imimaginable terror. 
There was no mistaking what had happened. 
f ^ The German submarines were at work on the 

^f City of Ships from below, and the Zeppelins 

were bombing it from above. No wonder the 
unhappy victims bawled ! The carnage lasted 
some fifteen shattering minutes. Then all was 



the 6^ 
ni 

coiiik 

bkok 

wek 

roll 






f' still. . . . 



i 



Next morning I sent for the doctor, and lit- 
tle wonder after what I had gone through. 

"Did you hear that caterwauling in the 
night?" he asked in his jolly laughing way. 

"I did," I answered faintly. "What of it?" 

"It was the ships in the Downs blowing oflF 



180 THE BROWN MARE 

their syrens to welcome the New Year, of 
course/' he said, and chuckled as he washed his 
hands. "A fool of a sentry thought it was 
Zeppelins and loosed off his rifle and nearly 
shot a donkey/* 

"Just like 'em!" I said, and laughed up- 
roariously at the fellow's folly. 

Then, two days before we left the House on 
the Cliff came the dark reality. 

It was a February afternoon of the fairest. 
I was slowly climbing the last hill home, when 
of a sudden I was aware of I knew not what. 

Some primeval instinct warned me to be- 
ware. 

I stood with ears alert and sniffed. 

There was a faint, strange smell in the air, 
and a faint, far humming. 

I looked seawards. Nothing was visible but 
a remote destroyer. I gazed up into the heav- 
ens. Not a speck darkened the brilliant blue. 

Then a man on the crest of the hill, fifty 
yards above me, a woman at his side, cried sud- 
denly — 

"There she goes r 

I looked again. And sheer overhead I 



THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 181 

caught a flash and sparkle. It was infinitely 
f ar, a part of the blue ; as though a tiny patch 
of heaven had suddenly crystallized. 

For a moment I was astounded. The love- 
liness of that remote and shining something, 
on whose under-wings the westering sun was 
beating up, possessed and dazzled me. For 
one brief second I thought of a creature from 
another world, so bright it seemed, so impal- 
pable, and above all so unimaginably remote; 
and I was afraid. 

"What is it?" I cried to the man on the crest, 
my heart still full of awe and ecstasy. 

**Just what I can't make out," he shouted 
back. 

We had not long to wait for an answer. 

There was a bang — ^bang — ^bang 1 And out 
of the green hillside across the valley, two hun- 
dred yards away, suddenly spurted great black 
mushrooms of smoke, one after another. 
Bang — bang — ^bang! — and one of the houses 
skirmishing on the outskirts of the town was 
enveloped in a dirty cloud. 

"Take cover 1" called a fierce, authoritative 
voice near by. 



18« THE BROWN MARE 

The man on the crest, who was lame, limped 
swiftly into his house, the woman scuttling be- 
fore him. 

I was left on the bare road, conscious of that 
fatal and beautiful thing poised pliunb over- 
head. 

I dared not look up. Were I to do so the 
falling bomb would surely catch me in the 
face ; and I preferred to take it on the neck. 

I made for the house opposite ; it was empty 
and locked. 

Then the lame man came running out. 

"Come in here, sir!" he called. 

But it was all over. And the creature from 
another world was flying homewards in the 
light of the sinking sun, the smoke of its handi- 
work pursuing it leisurely across the waters 
in pillars of soot. 

A few minutes later I was standing on the 
hillside amid the little crowd of men in khaki, 
of women and children, gathered about the su- 
perficial craters caused by the bombs, and 
souvenir-hunting. 

They were all very merry; congratulating 
themselves inwardly on their heroism; full of 



THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF 188 

that flatulent joy, and false bonhomie, which 
escape from sudden death engenders in all but 
the humble of heart. 

One bomb» it seemed, had fallen through the 
roof of a girls' school, and passed through a 
room in which fourteen children were gathered, 
hurting none. Two had fallen in the play- 
ground; one had plumped through a house 
hard by. 

A woman gashed by splintered glass, and a 
score of frightened children; these were the 
raider's harvest. 

It all seemed incredibly trivial, spiteful, and 
silly. And it was War. 



THE COST 

HE was one of the men I had somehow 
believed could not die. 
And when that May morning, with 
England at her loveliest, I read the notice in 
the always lengthening obituary of the Times 
I was — ^amazed. 

The torpedoing of the Lusitania, recorded 
in the same paper, seemed to me somehow as 
nothing beside that other intimate catastrophe. 

Then I took up the paper and re-read the 
notice. 

It was not particularly to the point; for it 
dealt with him simply as an athlete. The real 
Ronald was clearly quite unknown to the 
writer; but there was one sentence in those 
half-dozen lines that lingered in my mind. 

He was probably the greatest Rugby three-quarter 
hack of M time. 

He was: and he was much more. 

And as I puzzled it all out — our hopes, his 

134 



THE COST 185 

opportunities, this sudden catastrophe— I 
found myself dully hutting my head against 
the hard wall of the simple facts — 

Ronald was no more. He had not died. 
He had been killed deliberately — ^this boy who 
never had an enemy, and who so loved his life. 

C^est trop bite, la guerre, say the wise 
French peasants in their simple way as they 
till their fields up to the very trenches. And 
surely they are right. It is the stupidity of 
the thing, and not its wickedness, that staggers 
the modern mind. 

And of all the stupidities of the war, this for 
the moment seemed to me the most crass. 

Here was a beautiful creature — 

A dust that England bore, shaped, made aware. 
Gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 
A body of England's, breathing English air. 
Washed by her rivers, blessed by suns of home, 

with the youth in his limbs, the light in his face, 
the hope in his heart, stopped dead. 

As I revolved the matter in my mind the 
occasion on which I had last seen him kept 
recurring to me. 

It was at the time of the Welsh match in the 
April before the War. He was Captain of 



186 THE BROWN MARE 

the English team. I think the King was pres- 
ent, but I forget the King; though I have a 
hazy memory of seeing Ronald tripping down 
the steps from the dressing-room at the head of 
his team and standing in his football shorts and 
blue jersey shaking hands with a little man in 
a round hat before the Grand Stand, 

It was very much Ronald's game that day. 
The thirty-thousand gathered to watch him 
were all agreed on that. His playing was as 
always original. It was as different from that 
of other men as he was different from them. 
It was spiritual; and its quality effortlessness. 
The strain, the ferocity, the contortions and 
grimaces, of others who indulge in that heroic 
and elemental tuzzle which is Rugby football 
were not for him. 

Nobody ever saw him gnash his teeth on the 
football field; I doubt if anybody ever knew 
him cross; certainly nobody ever heard him 
swear. And I for one rarely knew him issue 
a command — certainly never a hortatory one 
— ^though he was usually Captain. A steady 
briUiance pervaded his play and personality 
alike. Always master of the game, he 7as con- 
summately master of himself. And he han- 



THE COST 187 

died his men with the same miconscious ease 
with which he swooped and swerved through 
the enemy towards the goal. 

An incident in the game comes hack to me. 
It spoke to me at the moment of Ronald and 
his capacity for winning men. He had tackled 
an enemy three-quarter in full career. The 
pack was on them in a moment as they strug- 
gled and had smothered them. The two men 
emerged from beneath the worry at last; and 
the enemy three-quarter, as he withdrew to- 
wards his own line, gave an intimate little pat 
on the shoulder to the man who had wrought 
his headlong ruin and crushed in a moment the 
fruition of his plans. 

I love you, it said. 

And it was not only on the football field that 
his genius for government appeared. At 
Rugby, at Oxford, in those camps of working- 
men by the sea which he loved, in Boys' Clubs 
in mean quarters of great towns, it was always 
the same. He led, I think as much as any- 
thing, because he never sought to lead. Au- 
thority clothed him naturally as the grass the 
field. Men and boys acknowledged allegiance 
to a power they could not define and of which 



188 THE BROWN MARE 

the user was unconscious. The root of the 
matter lay perhaps in this: that there was no 
egoism in the man. He was one of the hum- 
hie of heart, without a trace of morhid diffi- 
dence. 

Therefore some believed that he had in him 
a power for bettering the affairs of men which 
none of his more brilliant Balliol contempora- 
ries, greedy of power, voraciously ambitious, 
wearisomely successful, possessed. 

Three months after his last International, 
War was declared. 

At Oxford he had joined the Officers' 
Training Corps; but when the authorities 
urged him to become an officer he refused. 
Later, when he had left Oxford, it seemed to 
him his unpleasant duty to accept a commis- 
sion in his coimty Territorial Battalion. 

The adventure and romance of War made 
no appeal to him. It was a dirty business that 
had to be got through. 

It may have been because his mother came 
of Quaker and his father of Nonconformist 
stock; it may have been that he had been 
brought up in the academic and not the im- 



THE COST 189 

perial tradition; whatever the cause, it is surely 
worthy of record that perhaps the greatest 
athlete of his generation hated soldiering from 
his heart although he died in battle. 

He hated soldiering and never took his sport 
m killing. As a tiny boy he protested against 
what seemed to him the wanton destruction of 
flies. Later in life, when he was one of the 
richest young men of his day, and the owner 
of a great estate, the pursuits of the jeunesse 
dorSe only bored him. He never hunted, 
never shot ; and never wished to do so. 

"The horse was very fierce," he writes in his 
simple way, of a ride he once took. 

It was not that he thought killing for pleas- 
ure wrong; it was that he disliked it. 

He loved life himself, and in his large and 
sunny way he wished others to enjoy what he 
found so dear — ^the lower creatures too. 

And it is a bitter commentary on things as 
they are that this young man, whose heart was 
brimming with loving-kindness, never killed 
anything deliberately save perhaps other men. 

All through the hot and terrible days of Au- 
gust 1914, Oxford and Cambridge poured 



140 THE BROWN MARE 

their best into the ranks of Kitchener's Army. 

The Expeditionary Force was flung into 
France. The Territorial battalions were mo- 
bilized, and might foUow at any moment. 

Ronald was an officer in one of these. As 
such he had taken on for Home Service alone, 
and had therefore the right to refuse to serve 
abroad. 

At the outbreak of the War his father and 
mother were abroad; and two of his friends 
embassied half across England to urge him to 
consider his responsibilities and exercise his 
rights. 

He was furious with them. 

In fact, his battalion did not leave for the 
Front for another six months. And that six 
months did not make the profession that had 
been forced upon him any dearer. 

"I had rather be making biscuits,'' he wrote 
to a friend. 

In those days he changed. Something of 
the old radiance was departing from his face; 
and little wonder. His friends were falling 
like autumn leaves. The boys who had 
stormed across Bigside at Rugby in his vic- 
torious wake, the men who had followed him 



THE COST 141 

to victory in many a University match, were 
going down in swathes. It was the platoon- 
leaders, the men of his own age, who were 
catching the full hlast of lead and steel, that 
was sweeping over Europe. And his turn 
would come. He never doubted it. 

"It*s not what I should have wished," he ad- 
mitted just before he went. 

For he was happy in his life, happy in his 
opportunities, as are few. 

His uncle, a great Captain of Industry, had 
made him his heir. And labouring as a com- 
mon hand among the working-men he under- 
stood so well, in the immense biscuit factory 
which he was one day to control, he was quietly 
dreaming of the work to which he meant to 
devote his life. 

He had the chance, and he had the capacity 
and the desire to make the most of it. 

For his heart was set not on adding to his 
fortune, or going into Parliament, but on ad- 
justing the relations between Master and Men. 

Here was the task; and here apparently a 
soul supremely adapted by nature and oppor- 
tunity to undertake it with success. 

A casual bullet at midnight as he stood on 



14« THE BROWN MARE 

the parapet of a trench directing a fatigue- 
party ended his dreams and our expectations. 

"We shall win in this war," said a soldier- 
friend to me the other day, "because in the 
end Love always wins." 

It does; and the price is Calvary. 

And he does not stand alone. 

In the minds of many his name will be re- 
corded with that of another youth, so like him, 
and yet so unlike. 

The two were at Rugby together; of singu- 
lar beauty and athletic excellence. 

I do not know if they were friends at school. 
I should say probably not. For Rupert from 
boyhood was a poet, and Ronald a man of 
action. 

The names almost betray the men and the 
diflFerence between them. 

After schooldays I doubt if they ever met: 
for the poet went to Cambridge, and the en- 
gineer to Oxford. 

And it was typical that the one became a 
Fabian and lectured on the Minority Report, 
while the other plunged into the practical la- 
bours of Boys' Clubs. Ronald remained a 



THE COST 148 

stout Churchman while Rupert was writing 
ironical verse about the creed of his fathers. 

Again after they had left their Universities 
the one was sweating as a mechanic in the 
engine-room of a factory, while the other was 
sailing the South Seas and bursting into song 
in honour of dusky maidens. 

Of the two youths it was difficult to say which 
was the more beautiful. Certainly I know no 
two young Englishmen who would have been 
more loved by the Greeks. 

Rupert I saw but once; but I recall him 
well — ^his fair hair, rather longer than that of 
other men, his collar rather lower, his attire 
rather more neglige— sitting with his blue 
eyes and spiritual face in the window of a room 
overlooking the river at Chelsea, reading to a 
little Bohemian gathering a paper on what 
appeared to him the most urgent of Social 
Reforms — ^the guaranteeing by the State of a 
pension of £500 a year to every minor poet. 

He was something more than a mere poetas- 
ter himself; though, apart from his personal 
beauty which gave him an unfair advantage, 
for long he by no means outshone his multi- 
tudinous rivals. Men — and women still more 



144 THE BROWN MARE 

— recognized in his face the poet of their 
dreams, read his verses in the light of that vi- 
sion glorious, and trumpeted him as the master 
he was not. 

The War touched him to immortality. 

Contact with the brutalities of life stripped 
his fine spirit of its frills and furbelows. 

It stood forth naked and radiant and un- 
ashamed. 

He joined the Royal Naval Division, and 
the bombardment of Antwerp made a man and 
a poet of him. 

Between the declaration of War and his 
death he wrote a handful of sonnets that will 
endure as long as English poetry. 

And he lived just long enough to taste his 
fame. 

A few weeks before he died Dean Inge 
quoted from the pulpit of St. PauFs his in- 
comparable lines — 

If I should die, think only this of me — 

He did die — almost immediately ; perhaps a 
month before his school-fellow. 

The one lad sleeps in a wood in Flanders 
on the hither-side of our trenches ; the other un- 



THE COST 146 

der an olive-grove on an island in the iBgean 
Sea within sound of the guns wrangling over 
the Dardanelles. 

And thousands of their peers — ^the boys they 
knew and sported with at school and Univer- 
sity — sleep at their sides. 

Let their just epitaph be — 

Theif went to War in the cause of Peace, and died 
without Hate that Lave might live. 



THE END 




''Borzoi" stands for the best in litera- 
ture in all its branches — drama and fiction, 
poetry and art. ''Borzoi'' also stands for 
unusually pleasing book-making. 

Borzoi Books are good books and there 
is one for every taste worthy of the name. 
A few are briefly described on the next 
page. Mr. Knopf will be glad to see that 
you are notified regularly of new and forth- 
coming Borzoi Books if you will send him 
your name and address for that purpose. 
He will also see that your local dealer is 
supplied. 



Address THE BORZOI 
220 West Forty-Second Street 

New York 




The New Borzoi books 

Published by ALFRED A. KNOPF 



TALES OF THE PAMPAS By W. H. Huckon. author of ''Gi^n 
Mansioiu.** Including what Edward Gamett calk **the finest sh<^ 
story in Elnglish." lliree-color jacket $1.25 

A DRAKE I BY GEORGE I By John Trevena. A perfectly 
delightful tale of DeTonshire, with plot and humor a-plenty. $ 1 .50 

THE CRUSHED FLOWER From the Russian of Leonid Andreyev. 
Three novelettes and some great short stories by this master. $1.50 

JOURNALISM VERSUS ART By Max Eastman. A brilliant 
and searching analysis of what is wrong with our magazine writing and 
illustrations. Many pictures of unusual interest $ 1 .00 

MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY From the Russian of Alexander 
Komilov. The only work in English that comes right down to the 
present day. Two volumes, boxed, per set $5.00 

THE RUSSIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING From the Russian of 
Alexandre Benois, with an introduction by Christian fionton and thirty- 
two fufl-page plates. The only survey in EngKsh. $3.00 

SUSSEIX GORSE By Sheila Kaye-Smith. A wonderfully vig<xrous 
and powerful novel of Sussex. A really masterly book. $ 1 .50 

RUSSIA'S MESSAGE By William English Walling, with 31 iflus- 
trations. A new and revised edition of this most important work. $2.00 

WAR From die Russian of Michael Artzibashef, author of "Sanine.** 
A four-act play of unusual power and strength. $ 1 .00 

MORAL From the German of Ludwig Thoma. A three-act comedy 
that is unfike anything ever attenq>ted in English. $ 1 .00 

MOLOCH By Beulah Marie Dix. Probably the most thrilling play 
ever written tbovt war. $ 1 .00 

THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL From the Russian of Nicdai 
GogoL author of ''Taras Bulba.'* The first adequate version in English 
of this masterpiece of comedy. $ I .OO 

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT A handsome holiday edition 
of George Meredith's Arabian Entertainment Widi fifteen beautiful 
fJates and an introduction by George Eliot. Qyarto. $5.00 

A tt prices are net. 
220 WEST FORTY-'SECOND STREET, NEW YORK